Welcome back to my column. I’m mirroring posts from my blog at amerrylifeandashortone.blogspot.com. Not all of them are going to be column worthy, but expect one or two a month. As should be expected from the title, there is no topic beyond what I feel like writing about.

Great news, everyone! You’ll be delivering a package to Chapek 9, a world where humans are killed on sight.
Professor Farnsworth – Futurama

So uh. Yeah. Lets quote CCP’s latest thingymahbob.

CCP Atlas has some great news for 3rd party developers in his latest dev blog. Read all about the new business license and monetizing 3rd party apps here.

I do not like where this is going.

So if you follow the link, you’ll find a dev blog update. This dev blog update is uh… not great news. It’s not great news for me, not for you, and not for anyone else except a few application developers. So I have a fansite agreement with CCP for my blog. As it stands right now, I can post anything I damn well please. If people donate isk to me, that’s great. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. On top of that, I run my own podcast. My Co-Host Arydanika actually put quite a lot of work, time, and some money into getting that running as well.

Now I’ve taken care that through all of my interactions with advertisers, I’ve not taken a single cent of actual money. If people want to support it through isk, I provide advertising for them to do so.

None of that matters. Despite some backpedaling today that seems to say “Oh well this is a rough draft and nothing is set in stone yet”, the draft we’ve been presented indicates that my podcast site will need to pay 99 dollars a year to keep running.

Essentially, I have to pay CCP to do free work for CCP. Now, I’m not as worried about myself. What I do worry about, and what you should worry about, is everyone else.

Here’s a quick list of stuff I can think of, off the top of my head, that will need to pay CCP 100 bucks a year to keep operating.

EveNews24
Dotlan
Eve Fitting Tool
EveMon
EveHQ
Battleclinic

That’s a short list. I have a whole bookmarks folder devoted to Eve websites. Oh, and CCP’s definition is so vague that it’s possible that transactions that take place entirely inside eve will also fall under this type of license. Yes, mercenary corps will have to pay CCP 99 dollars to provide their services to others ingame. I’m sure that’s not what CCP had in mind, but it’s what they said.

CCP won an award a while back for best community. Part of the reason for this is the easy availability of material, and the low barrier of entry. Got a website and and idea? You can contribute to the community.

In the guise of finally allowing third party apps to make a profit, CCP is trying to monetize the greatest resource they have, and one of the only reasons to keep playing their game: the community. They’re not even going to make that much money off it either.

They’re killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and no matter how much they go digging… honestly it’s not pretty in there.