I sat down with David Reid, Chief Marketing Officer of CCP Games, and discussed "the most dangerous, complicated and rewarding journey in video games."

Going into Rubicon, how have you guys approached the marketing, and is it succeeding so far?

The first thing we did was...this was the first time we've done an announcement of an expansion on our Twitch channel...like, a live stream of "let us tell you about the next expansion and announce the name" and things like that. It was an idea of how to bring it to the community first, and get some real quick reactions on ideas in Rubicon. We've seen a big response to the Sisters of EVE ships, of course, everybody loves new ships...big responses to some of the things we were talking about earlier, the things that make EVE a little easier to understand without making it an easier game to play. We're not trying to make it an easy game, but we do want to make it more approachable for new players, and Rubicon is doing some of that. There are parts of Rubicon we saved for here, right? We had the announcement of what we're doing with Ghost Sites.

Something really interesting there that we have not yet told everybody is just how big this thing is going to be. Rubicon is a name we chose very carefully, because it does have a historical significance: it is the iconic moment at which Caesar decided to attack Rome and there was no turning back. There is something happening in this expansion that is the beginning, in a way, of this long journey toward building stargates and colonizing new parts of the universe, right? Going out and finding new galaxies, and letting that sandbox mechanic start all over again in an entirely different place. We talked about that vision at FanFest quite a bit, but Odyssey wasn't really the beginning of that – Rubicon is. There's stuff to come that will shed even more light on that.

You have to think about it, right? EVE has 7,000 some star systems and, since it was launched, those have been populated. We've had wormhole space added, we've done things like that...but at some level, the way that an MMO gamer is typically used to expansion is new zones, and we haven't done that before. Rubicon is the beginning of a process – I'm not gonna tell you it's happening in Rubicon, it's a little further out there, right? But this is the beginning of that process and, as players assemble the components and build the technologies and acquire them to build these stargates...somebody is going to be the first person into the new galaxy, right? It is going to happen...
 

...and maybe they'll get a mystery code for it!

Ah-ha! No, we might give them more than that! But yeah, it's a great idea.

Will any pieces of the Collector's Edition be available after the Collector's Edition is sold out?

We are talking about these things. Right now, we've got Collector's Editions to sell, and we're gonna stick with that. But yeah, I do think that...as an example, we're already taking orders from Icelandic retailers for the Collector's Edition because it has The Danger Game in there, and it just makes us think "Well geez, okay, we probably didn't need to sell the whole Collector's Edition there." And ya know, granted, we have like a 1,000 EVEplayers in Iceland, so it's not crazy to sell Collector's Editions there, but we could probably sell a lot more of The Danger Game (just updated) in the territory, right? And so it does lead us down that path and get us thinking about this. It's something I expect we will do, but I don't really know when or to what extent.
 

So just "down the road", gotcha. The Collector's Edition book would especially interest me.

Yeah. The stories about this game are fascinating, but the stories about this company are really fascinating as well, right? How did this group of 30 people that had never made a game before...they make something that has just stood this huge test of time. Back in that era – and it's easy to forget this – there was CCP making EVE Online, and there was Electronic Arts making Earth and Beyond [fansite]. If you had to put your money on one of those titles being around in 2013, the long odds would've been against CCP, right? It just turned out very differently than I think people expected, and there's a fascinating story underneath that.