TL;DR: CCP if you don’t fix the prices back to what they were before, this game is at the end.
And here’s the proof:
So there was this price increase to 20$/€ by 35% for a single month of EVE Omega game time, I always wondered who could be so mentally challenged as to think that was a good idea. But well. Here we are, according to EVE-Offline :: EVE-Online Status monitor in the last month, there has been an average of 16000 players logged in.
In the last six months since the price increase, EVE has lost a whopping 7000 players on average, six months ago there was an average of 24000 players logged in, which was already 10000 players less than the all time average. Let that sink in.
Since it’s just an average, it’s safe to assume that EVE lost about 50% of its real players during that time.
Sure, it was a very hot summer in the northern hemisphere, but that doesn’t justify being back at 2004 player numbers (on average). I was in EVE Online at the time, and it seemed pretty empty then compared to EVE’s heyday. It wasn’t engaging. Not enough content.
Only player controlled structures, wormholes and filaments allow us to still find each other, but every week it feels a little less active.
When a sandbox is empty, it’s just a barren desert. What keeps me going is the fact that I’m a member of a huge and awesome community in EVE, the best and nicest imaginable, of course, the Pandemic Horde, a group of players that defeated the Imperium within a month of setting up and even killed the last anchored (Imperium) Keepstar on the same day (Thank you, Alterari Phoenix, for that, again!).
For no other reason I’m sticking with this. But if there’s no change in pricing policy, I promise you we’re already riding a dead horse. No new player will upgrade from Alpha, certainly not the younglings of today. They simply can’t afford it in times of energy crisis and won’t do it as long as there are games on the market that you can play for free for a lifetime.
And especially considering there were no Alpha accounts, almost no bots, and only a few people multiboxing, the 2004 average player count we’re seeing now is the harbinger of death for this game.
Please, let’s not unsubscribe because we’re bored to death in a desolate wasteland.
And no, fixing sounds and introducing adaptive sync into the game after 20 years will not solve this problem.
The price increase was the biggest error of the last two decades after a wave of already serious blows.
