Set tens of thousands of years in the future, EVE Online is a breathtaking journey to the stars, to an immersive experience filled with adventure, riches, danger and glory. With nearly a quarter of a million subscribers worldwide inhabiting the same virtual universe, EVE features a vast player-run economy where your greatest asset is the starship, designed to accommodate your specific needs, skills and ambitions. EVE offers professions ranging from commodities trader to mercenary, industrial entrepreneur to pirate, mining engineer to battle fleet commander or any combination of these and much more. From brokering business deals to waging war, you will have access to a diverse array of sophisticated tools and interfaces to forge your own destiny in EVE.
The establishment of a retail distribution channel for EVE Online comes at a time of rapid subscriber growth and technical advancements. The game has attracted nearly 250,000 loyal, active subscribers. Its single shard universe has evolved technically to support massive battles of 1,000+ players with minimal lag, due to CCP’s StacklessIO and EVE64 initiatives. In addition, CCP will enhance gameplay within EVE Online by rolling out a series of content rich free expansions in 2009.
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 the official website 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.
The boxed version of EVE Online includes the game client, 60 days of subscription time and exclusive extras. It will also include all nine previously released EVE Online expansions. All new expansions will be free of charge to all subscribers, continuing CCP’s release policies.
EVE Online is currently available woldwide as digital download or at retail.