With MMORPGs, it can often be like pulling teeth to get any real, concrete numbers free of confusing marketing spin language, especially when it comes to subscribers. Imagine my surprise then, when at this year's EVE Fan Fest, the developers released a bevy of numbers on everything from subscriptions to the average age of their player base. For CCP, it seems as though transparency is king:

Population

It has always been a goal of CCP's to populate their game with more people than Iceland. For the record, that number is about 320,000 according to the country's Wikipedia entry.

According to one of the presentations held at Fan Fest, EVE is hitting just shy of their mark in terms of current paying subscribers, with a total population of 302, 657. However, the goal is achieved if you count the 30,000 to 40,000 trial accounts that are active at any given time.

Being a single shard game, EVE Online also keeps track of the game's concurrent user number. This is the total number of players online together on the server at any given time. That number recently topped out at just over 50,000. We are told, however, that the 50,000 is not the upper end of the company's technology and far more could be accommodated.

The Market and Economy

Setting EVE apart from its MMO counterparts is its thriving, player-run economy. It is such an important aspect of the game, and has become so complicated over the years that CCP has a full time real-life economist on its payroll. He tells us that the market handles over one million transactions per day, valuing four trillion ISK.

According to the most recent Quarterly Economic Newsletter, there are currently more than 300 trillion ISK on all of the accounts within the game, and 170 trillion of that is on active accounts. The average EVE player, we also learn, has about 500 million ISK to their name.

History

When EVE launched back in 2003, they did so with only 25,581 subscribers, a mere 8.5% of the game's current population. Most notable about the history of the game's population is that it has continued to climb at a slow and steady pace throughout the game's life cycle. This is particularly notable because it flies in the face of the norm for MMORPGs. Normally, an MMORPG launches, and quickly peaks in its total number of subscribers, slowly (or rapidly in some cases), losing them over time. This was not the case with EVE.

Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that developers tell us that of those original 25,581 subscriber, a surprising 20% (5116) of them are still playing the game today.

Over the course of the game's lifetime, 600,000 characters have been made by subscribers. Over three million people have tried the game in one form or another.

Miscellaneous Statistics

We've covered the big three areas of detail surrounding the statistics of EVE Online:

Population - everyone wants to know how many players are involved in the game.
Market and Economy - the game's economy is its driving force. Information on its operation is invaluable to players.
History - In order to understand the first two sections, it is important to look at where the game has been.

Finally, we come to the random statistics section. Numbers are fun, and since we don't get them often from MMOs, it's best to share all that we can find when we do:

• EVE players have logged 48,387,631,535 minutes in game. That's 433,231 years, or maybe you'd like it in hours: 806,460,525.
• 207,053 Player Corporations have been created in EVE Online. The total number of players formed corporations in the game that currently have more and zero members is 114,692.
• 95% of EVE's subscribers are male, and 28 is the average age of players.
• The oldest player in EVE is 76.