Interesting that EVE’s player count has been roughly that of Destiny 2’s for the past few years (minus some of the big farewell events). I know EVE has a lot of multiboxers, but still - in the grand scheme of things…
Marathon is cratering - down over half their playerbase in less than 4 months to just over 6,500 players. Looks like Vanguard will have one less extraction shooter to contend with.
There are almost as many Steam EVE players as Marathon players…
Player count in the launcher is not players, but characters. EVE has a fraction of the online character count as players.
I think this number is very much open to interpretation. I’d wager that more than half of the concurrent “characters” are actually players. But I’m not dismissing what you’re saying out-of-hand…
With the massive number of Homefront alt farms, Null Sec isthar farms, FW bot farms, exploration bot farms (I recently got 10 ban mails from CCP 
), I highly doubt that. Sadly, CCP does not release actual player numbers any more.
Honestly, it’s anyone’s guess.
But how many EVE players play this game through Steam?
Isn’t that only a small fraction?
I use Steam for most of my games, but never used it for EVE.
Also player numbers of newly released games have nothing to do with EVE. They’re following a new game hype if lucky and many of them drop equally fast in the matter of months or years at best where EVE has had a largely stable player base for decades.
Just shy of 5k “characters”. So that’s maybe 15%-ish of the concurrent number on Tranquility?
Keep in mind that bots are far more visible than regular players, so high presence of bots doesn’t mean there are few players.
Take for example 25 players, of which 24 play an hour a day and 1 is a bot that is online 24/7.
Player stats could suggest ‘2 players’ are online all day: each hour another player and also the bot.
In game you would also see one other player and one bot.
This gives the suggestion that 50% of the players are bots in the game and in the player stats, even though in this example only one in 25, or 4% of the players are a bot and 96% of the players are legitimate.
The tendency of bots to make much longer days than the majority of normal players also makes them far more visible.
The count may be 5k - 6k if the launcher says 30k thanks to the allowance of multi accounting and alphas…
Stop this and you would get the REAL numbers
Multiboxing is here to stay. That particular Pandora’s Box was opened long ago, so you either choose to accept it or live on in denial.
No it’s not…it only takes minor changes to simply not allow it…
You forget that we have different devs than in the past, they actually care about other approaches to the game than PVP.
And beside that…my remark only was to clarify the REAL numbers and not a rage against multiboxing.
Because this is the theme of this treath.
That statement in of itself demonstrates a fundamental lack of how EVE generates revenue. It’s not an “easy” or even simple fix (technologically), and would probably be devastating financially.
Sure it is easy…simply read out the ip and the launcher identification…it is already done by checking if multiple alpha accounts are running…
So don’t tell me
‘This does not work’…
VPN, virtual machines, etc. MAC addresses don’t work, either. Anything can be spoofed to some extent…
If players are willing to make the investment, yes - this won’t work.
All those identify themselves too…
The simple fact that you seem to think the devs would be that stupid to not put this into account shows a LOT more about you that you were willing to offer 
All to save $40-$60? Surely you jest…
yup we’re all going to save 100—150 per month, CCP(whatever) is shotting itself in the foot.
You just pluck figures out of the air. As a member of a large corp with several thousand members, I know from experience that MOST players are logging in just one char. When the call goes out during a fleet battle for people who can multibox to add their alts…probably only 10% of players HAVE any alts to add. That is direct experience…not nonsense you just made up.
Of course…as you have never even undocked let alone taken part in any battle…you wouldn’t know any of this.
player base get gets less every day, which is why the losers who farm character make new accounts every day to prop up the belief eve’s actually got players.
i log on find no content, i log off, i wont be paying for these four accouts much longer, eves gone to ■■■■.
Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is the persistant universe.
Stuff you bought/amassed 20 years ago still exists in Eve… and you know it… this means any player can return at any time and not have to ‘restart’ but just pick up where they left off… It’s a great retention mechanic and Eve’s population regularly benefits from waves of returning players.