EVE Online turns six, celebrates record-breaking population

by: Randy - posted: 5/6/2009 10:07:00 PM

There are scores of MMOs that never made it to their sixth birthday.  Auto Assault didn't.  Fury didn't.  Hellgate London didn't.  And Tabula Rasa sure didn't either. 

But today -- May 6, 2009 -- EVE Online has.  And it's not some whimpering "Hey, we're still here!  Really!" cry either.  EVE is still growing and reporting solid numbers.  They've gained over 60,000 new subscribers in 2009 alone, due in part to a renewed advertising presence, in part to putting a Special Edition SKU on store shelves once again, and it certainly hasn't hurt that the recently-launched EVE Online: Apocrypha is such a successful expansion as well.

All this lovely planetary alignment (and outright dedicated work ethic from the folks at CCP Games) pushed the active subscriber count to over 300,000, not counting approximately 25,000 trial accounts underway.  And at 300,000 subscribers, you're well into the big leagues when it comes to MMO numbers.  And one entirely unique feature of EVE is that every single one of those subscribers is on the same server.  No shards.  And there have also been up to 53,850 pilots logged in concurrently -- a feat that requires a pricey amount of hardware to make happen.

Happy sixth, EVE.  I'll be there for your seventh.

EVE Online celebrates its 6th year of existence today--May 6th. That's six strong years of continuous growth thanks to tireless integration of user feedback into game design and pushing to release around two major free expansions per year. Our single-shard world, where everyone plays on the same shared server, has seen tremendous benefit from having each player able to interact and affect each other player in a persistent manner. From massive fleet battles to individual bonds of trust, every pilot in EVE has the potential to rock the ship of hundreds of thousands of others by their actions.

At one population milestone we saw agreements form between alliances. At another we were able to fully turn over the economy to the players. As the population of New Eden has grown, so have the instances of emergent behaviors of its pilots. A 6 year persistant history. A living history where truly brilliant strategies have unfolded. Truly terrible betrayals unveiled. We are excited to see what will happen next.

This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to our latest free expansion EVE Online: Apocrypha and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we've had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers. That doesn't include trial accounts. We've broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn't think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE's boundless potential.

As always, we encourage you to bring your friends, family and even enemies to New Eden by visiting www.eveonline.com and downloading a free trial or by heading to your local retailer and purchasing a copy of EVE Online, which includes 60 days of game time.