In other niche game news, Tobold was right, CCP has declared bankruptcy in 2012.
If your definition of bankruptcy is hitting 450k+ subs with a 10 year old MMO. But yea, totally bankrupt, yo.
(Cue China does not count, WoW really had 12m subs, and still has 10m subs.)
(Double cue EVE is played by one guy with 450k accounts, who pays nothing because he uses PLEX.)
Hardcore Casual 
You probably mean “cue”. But bonus points for misspelling something as the much-harder-to-spell homophone!
Word can only do so much. I blame MS.
I think you mean “queue”…
PLEX actually cost money… Someone buys them from CCP, so CCP get’s paid anyway.
Tobold really gets to you, doesn’t he?
Without Tobold, Syn would really struggle to come up with enough blog topics when not much news comes out.
Thanks to Tobold all he has to do is pop over to his blog and there is normally a topic Syn can rage over.
If you’re talking about income, Eve is doing really well. Selling PLEX for more money than a month’s subscription? Brilliant.
However, Eve has two active shards now. China and Non-China. The only appeal to Eve are the other players to interact with, even if that interaction is trying to avoid them.
Going to a wormhole was to stake our claim to private space where we can keep other players out.
That aside, to succeed in 2013, Eve will have to get their subscribers to log in more frequently.
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/12/slow-bleed.html
28k concurrent users on average isn’t enough.
One thing they’re going to have to address is nullsec sov issues. Most of those corps are just feeding off the moon income without actually living in the space. I’d argue that the only people who actually have true sovereignty are the wormhole corps who actively guard the base, watch the incoming holes, and deal with intruders aggressively.
Also Eve will have to deal with supercap proliferation.
Imagine the day when super-alliances would actually have to hold their territory and keep intruders out… I’d expect most to fragment.
Right now, most areas of nullsec are safer for its residents than highsec.
Also, one aspect of living in the system is to do your industry out there. They’re going to need to fix being able to refine parts at 100% efficiency. Being able to construct in highsec then ship to nullsec at hypercondensed volumes is game breaking. Adding even a 5% decay in materials is enough to stop this practice.
Funny that some corps even create capital ships to jump to nullsec and refine. O.o
As someone said: EVE is the worst MMO, except for all the other MMOs out.
I’m confused….450,000 subs and this:
http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
Are they leaving off a digit? I mean its great that CCP has so much sub money flowing in….but are people not playing?
I kept an EVE sub for quite a while, but eventually dropped it. I’ve no idea how many people keep subscriptions in games. I’d be flabbergasted if 400,000 people had subscriptions and were not playing…but maybe.
thoughts?
1) It isn’t 450k people, it is 450k subs. The average eve player has 3x accounts. I’ve known people with 12x subs. Now, no one player is playing all 12 accounts at the same time. Usually people play two, sometimes three at a time.
2) Players dont’ play during the same time, and Eve’s population is probably the most diverse in the world of MMOs. In a given day, ~120k accounts log in… or more.
3) Not everyone plays every day (though in Eve, most probably do).
4) You’re looking only at Tranquility. That server probably has 300-350k subs. Chinese players play on a different, less mature server.
don’t forget Chribba has 39 accounts ;)
So they have 150,000 people playing??
That’s not the total number of different accounts that log in. It’s the average concurrent accounts logged in.
It makes sense to me that at any one time, 90% of people might not be logged in. After all, if you had an EVE account, you would probably spend 90% of your time not logged in.
Yeah I’m not sure how many hours a day Teer expects the average player to spend logged in. The graph bounces between 20,000-ish off peak and 40,000-ish peak, every day. Call it 30,000 average and that’s 1/15 of the total subs, or the average account being online a little over an hour and a half per day. Sounds pretty normal to me.
I guess the question is why there are more subscriptions but fewer concurrent players.
If we are saying that players are not playing together as much, this can’t be good for the health of the MMO.
More casuals playing EVE is my theory (post later today).
The most extreme example is banning a bot account vs someone who plays once or twice a week. Remove the bot, and you lose 23/7 activity. Remove the other guy, you lose 1-3 hours a week.
So say you remove all the bots, but they all get replaced by casuals. Concurrency will sharply drop, sub numbers (the amount of money CCP is making) will stay the same.
@Teer
Probably like me. I’ve been an EvE subscriber on and off since my first character back in August 2006. Spent time in a corp in 2008 and then allowed the sub to lapse again when the corp folded.
I recently reactivated now that I managed to generate some renewed interest for EvE with my clanmates. We’re now considering getting our new guys up to speed and help them mount the difficulty cliff of EvE.
So it seems a hell of a lot of people subscribe but don’t all log on all the time / run alts / three box. I’ve commented about lack of active players in the past but I am more than willing to admit I was wrong.
My favourite EVE folly is the common meme that “oh, if they really had 450,000 PLAYERS, they’d be a success, but they have less than 450,000 players paying for 450,000 ACCOUNTS total, so they’re a failure.”
Never heard anyone take the extra step and actually tell me WHY I should believe that earning $15 each from three people is good but earning $45 from one person is bad.
It seems very clear from the wording that CCP is counting the Chinese subscribers in this number.
I believe before the Chinese market was counted they still had a solid base of 350-400,000 paying accounts as referenced by Syncaine’s earlier posts.
Note: They didn’t say “active” or “paying” subscribers.
I have an alt account, which I let go idle almost a year ago, which was paid for by the PLEX received from the buddy system (ie. it cost nothing). However, the alt account still gets email from CCP. Is this account included in their sub numbers?
I’m sure that CCP wouldn’t publish anything that made it look like the active subscriber base was getting smaller. So, who knows exactly how they compute this number. It is like that glass-half-empty-glass-half-full thing – its all how you interpret a bunch of raw numbers.
You’re confusing accounts with subscriptions. If you’re paying then you have a subscription. If you’re not, your subscriptions finished and you just have an account. There’s no such thing as a non-paying subscription, so unless CCP are outright lying, they have 450k people paying for accounts.
I do not believe CCP are lying, but your distinction between accounts & subscriptions is correct…
The number of accounts for EVE is easily in the millions, but only silly F2P browser games (or Turbine) report that number. It’s pointless.
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Star citizen Is going to crush eve online ……. for sure
you guys are seriously stupid lol, for one, Star Citizen ISN’T EVEN CLOSE to what eve is, their 2 completely different games, and ideas. the ONLY similarity they have is their space. The average account buys 3 plex a month on EVE, that is fact, just the other day $400,000+ was destroyed in a single fight. SOMEHOW those will have to be replaced, and ofcourse they have a lot of money to replace it, but all the other people/non high ladder people have to replace their carriers/dreadnoughts themself. seriously when your comparing the amount of subscribers to WoW, is just rediculous, they’ll get $14 a month from those, on average they get $50 a month from an eve player. you need to check your facts saying that eve should be shut down because its dead, its making sooooo much more money than you can even think of.