Eve Developer CCP Shuts Down Two Offices

Studios closing isn't really that unusual, but it can be telling of the changing tide in the gaming world. Viceral's closing is a clear sign, for example, that EA is effectively finished making single-player games for the time being. And with Eve developer CCP closing two of its five studios, namely the two who were largely responsible for VR game development, it's a clear-as-day sign that Virtual Reality gaming isn't in as healthy a spot as people may have hoped a year or two ago.

The two studios, which were hosted in Atlanta and Newcastle, held about 100 employees together. The Atlanta office was the folks responsible for World of Darkness, that MMO you forgot existed, and the production of the formally VR-exclusive Eve: Valkyrie, while the Newcastle office is just being sold. The London studio, one of the three that remain, will be taking over support for Eve: Valkyrie and Sparc.

Meanwhile, their Shanghai Office will be reduced and restructured to better focus their ambitions. While Project Nova and Project Aurora will continue as planned, other VR plans the company may have had have been canceled.

CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson had this to say:

Despite the success of the VR games we have released we will be shifting our focus to our PC and mobile initiatives, and will be centralizing those initiatives, along with the support of our existing VR games, to our offices in Reykjavík and London. We will continue to support our VR games but will not be making material VR investments until we see market conditions that justify further investments beyond what we have already made.

VR, of course, has always been on a knifes edge. The entry fee for PC gaming is already super high, and adding an extra 800-dollar price tag to the end of it is simply too much for even some of the most hardcore fans to swallow. If CCP, a company that has devoted itself almost entirely to the PC marketplace, thinks theres no future in the hardware, that bodes very poorly for companies like Oculus and Vive.

Best of luck to those displaced by the closing. Heres hoping the industry gets another hiring boom sooner rather than later.