What Happens When They Buy EVE Online?

With the word that CCP may be for sale, I put together some speculation as to the results of certain companies buying the makers of EVE Online.

Worse case scenario?

(Above picture lifted from the Twitter of J3w3l/Eri of Healing the Masses)

Tencent – (My pick for likely candidate.)  Development moved to the west side of LA.  Runs mostly as usual.  Cash shop expanded.  Tournament play enhanced.  Alliance tournament winners paid in cash.  Able to straight up buy characters with skill packages (e.g. Avatar pilot, Amarr battleship pilot) for real world money.

Perfect World Entertainment – ZEN becomes the new RMT currency.  Officer drops only available via lockboxes.  Introduction of the Jovians with ships that look suspiciously like the Klingons in Star Treak Online.

Activision – Call of Duty: New Eden Combat becomes a thing.

Blizzard – Expansions now take more than two years, cost $50, and completely reset the combat meta with new modules you can only fit if you buy the update.  Scamming is banned.  High sec pilots are unattackable unless they flag PvP.  Faction grinds necessary again to even access empire stations.  Null sec space made much more colorful.  Fedo battle pets.  Chris Metzen comes back to do the lore.  Onyx renamed Onyxia.  Jovians turn out to be orcs.

Square Enix – Titans now wield giant swords.  Everything redone in soft focus.  Jovians discovered to be a race of hydrocephalic midgets. (That is a Lalafell joke right there.)

XL Games – Female space apparel now much more revealing.  Gallente ships now feature cleavage.  Avatar called out for what it actually modeled on.  You now have to pay rent to use the Captain’s quarters.

NCsoft – Whole thing gets moved to Austin and mostly ignored until revenue tanks and everything gets shut down in five years.

Daybreak – Expansions now only show up every November and cost $35, though there is a $140 collectors edition.  They mostly feature new incursions and missions.  Captain’s quarters now the 2 bedroom Freeport apartment with EQII avatars.  Corp housing available with ORE agents that will mine for you.  Minmatar ships begin to look more like gnomish clockwork and Antonia Bayle becomes Empress of Amarr.  Capsuleer Studio features player made ship SKINs and clothing.  As with other Daybreak games, the company gives the creators a cut of the sale price.  Rixx Javixx’s financial woes are solved.

Paradox Interactive – Game now moves faster than real time, but space travel is slowed to compensate.  Capsuleers no longer immortal, so you have to worry about your heirs.  Alliances now must be sealed by intermarriage between the families of corporation leaders.

Hello Games – Space is made infinite via procedural generation.  You can land on planets, but it is really boring so almost nobody bothers.  Later discovered that when you leave current New Eden space, the whole thing is just running locally on your own computer, which is why you never run into anybody else.

Cloud Imperium – Rebranded as Star Citizen: Strategic, the conversion of art assets begins to bring it into line with the Chris Roberts vision.  An Alpha version of the conversion is released two years later, but you still can still only look at all the ships you bought for it in an offline simulator.

Mojang –  “Players build everything” dream finally achieved, even if “everything” is now a lot more “blocky.”  Regions replace with biomes, space is now effectively infinite but really slow since it all runs in Java.  Llamas replace fedo.  NPC “creeper” drones now spawn at night… and it is always night in space… and blow up your shit.

Wargaming.net – Game rebranded as World of Spaceships and becomes a lobby based game where you start with corvettes/rookie ships and grind up for equipment upgrades and crew training through ten tiers of Alliance Tournament style fighting.

Microsoft – Excel integrated into the game, making it literally spreadsheets in space.  Buying a copy costs a lot more, but it comes pre-installed on your work machine and is on your IT department’s approved list.  The Caldari replace the Amarr as the focus of the in-game lore.

Electronic Arts – Second server opened with scamming banned, safe high sec, flagged PvP everywhere else.  Population of both servers fall below critical mass and the game is mostly ignored for three years, then EA closes the studio and shuts the whole thing down.  A few years later New Eden appears as the setting for a BioWare RPG while some art assets show up in a forgettable mobile game.

Any other likely candidates or scenarios?