At EVE Fanfest 2012 last week, we sat down with CCP's recently appointed Chief Marketing Officer, David Reid, to talk about cloud gaming and the future of EVE Online.

ZAM: Well it certainly makes a lot of sense. Obviously DUST 514 is your big focus right now and, for the foreseeable future, it and EVE Online will be the two core aspects to the EVE Universe, but have you considered expanding it even further than that?  In the EVE Keynote you mentioned something about cloud gaming or cloud social networking. A lot of people are looking to build cloud-based social networks to create large online communities. Do you have any big overarching plans you can share?

David: Well, let me give you an example. I'm fairly new to the company right now, but I first got to know the CCP guys when I was with Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta working on the Gametap business back in 2006 to 2008. Turner was a really interesting company in that when cable television first became an interesting technology platform, we saw a lot of the broadcast networks take their content and they would try to use cable as a distribution vehicle. Great! Smart idea! [laughs] That is, until a better idea came along to create new kinds of content that exploited what cable television allows you to do. To narrowcast and to create terrifically tailored content for a different audience in a way that might not be economically viable to do in the broadcast era. 

So in the same way that MTV, ESPN, CNN, Cartoon Network and all these fascinating businesses emerged into cable television, we see cloud gaming as another opportunity to do that kind of thing. Of course, while we think cloud-streaming is a very important way of getting games to gamers, that's not necessarily creating new kinds of games and new kinds of gameplay. So, with all of that in mind, we know we have something different and special and incredibly resilient in the single-shard of the EVE Universe. So, rather than trying to create new shards to expand the game, we can simply create new applications. And think of DUST 514 as a mega freaking application! It's tens of millions of dollars, four years of development, and a 120 people in Shanghai. So I don't want to say "app" in the way that most gamers think of apps [laughs], but if you think about it, DUST 514 is just a new way to get into the EVE universe.

Once we've proven that the technology is there and we've proven that gamers can co-exist in that shared universe despite playing their games in completely different ways, well, there's no reason it has to stop at two. It's not crazy to imagine that something like a planetary interaction could be on an iPad. It's not crazy to think that the character creator could be on the iPad. It's those kinds of things. We're not doing anything on that front right now, but we're certainly thinking a lot about it. If this crazy ambitious experiment with DUST 514 and EVE Online together proves to work, there's really no limit to where things can go from there.

ZAM: Most of my education was in journalism and communications, and a lot of the time we were told about how important the medium was in shaping content (students who studied Marshall McLuhan may remember his famous phrase, "the medium is the message"). When a new medium is introduced, older forms of media get transplanted onto it. So we get things like plays getting adapted to film, with actors sitting around a plant where the mic has been hidden. It feels, to me, that you see cloud platforms - or cloud gaming - as being a real opportunity to extend your universe.

David: That's exactly right. You could try porting EVE Online to a console or to a local device, and I think that would be a terrible idea. It's not the right experience for that platform. That said, there are plenty of great experiences on those platforms. So whether it's Facebook, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, iOS, Android, etc; when you've got a single-shard universe that works like EVE, you just need to think about the right moment-to-moment experience for that platform. With the right business model for consumers on that platform and the right way to connect it into that same EVE universe - the economy, the politics, the drama - that feels like the way forward. And that's cloud computing. If that's not cloud computing, I'm not sure what is [laughs].

ZAM: It's a fascinating approach, and knowing that's your coherent vision going forward, how does World of Darkness fit into your plans? I mean, we heard about those company redundancies last year...

David: Nobody should take the announcements of last year as a sign that the company is any less committed to World of Darkness. We have 55 people working on it right now and, when DUST ships, there will be more rolling onto it. It's a big team and it's a big bet. If anything, there's a case to be made that the IP - the brand of World of Darkness - could potentially be even bigger than EVE. It's a modern era game with mythology that everyone knows and it has resonated with men and women while staying true to being a hardcore brand. We know that if we can recapture the magic of EVE - and we think principally that that magic is about the sandbox and the single shard - if we can do that in a modern era setting, we've got some huge potential here.

ZAM: And you'll certainly benefit from the lessons learned from creating a persistent cross-platform world in EVE Online and DUST 514.

David: Absolutely. Oh absolutely. It's one of those things where, if you think about it, EVE Online is partly about flying in space and joining a corporation and participating in the industry, and it's partly about that single universe - that single shard. That part can be applied to any genre, any setting. Right now, we're focused on DUST and getting that EVE-DUST link right; we want that connection to be deeper than just orbital bombardments and surface cannons. But if we're successful with that - and we believe we will be! - when we're successful with that, there's no limit to the other sorts of experiences you can bring to the EVE universe, and there's no limit to the other kinds of universes you can build.

ZAM: Well, you've sold me! I'm definitely looking forward to it! Thanks for your time!

David: You bet! This has been fun!