EVE Online Celebrates 6th Anniversary With Cake
With EVE Online turning six years-old today and surpassing the 300,000 active subscriber mark over the past few days, there was really only one way for developer CCP to celebrate – spaceship cake.
While other massively multiplayer online games have drawn huge numbers and then struggled to retain them, CCP’s EVE Online has spent the past six years growing. So far 2009 has been very good to the game, with the concurrent user record being broken three separate times so far, with a standing record of 53,850 online at one time in one universe. The launch of the latest expansion, Apocrypha, has drawn even more players to the game, with active subscribers passing the 300K mark in the past week. Having started off the year with approximately 244,000, that’s a 22% growth – for a six year-old game.
Along with the announcement, CCP sent along this picture of the celebration cake they enjoyed at their North American headquarters in Atlanta. I’d congratulate them, but they know I live in Atlanta and neglected to invite me over for gamecake, a transgression I’m afraid I can never forgive. Check out their full announcement below, while I curl up on the couch with a Little Debbie Swiss cake roll and cry.
Happy Birthday EVE Online!
EVE Online celebrates its 6th year of existence today—May 6th. 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 behaviours 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 www.eveonline.com 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.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: THAT WAS A GOOD ONE. US GAMERS, HUH? US GAMERS.
[www.eegra.com]
@syafiqjabar:
So... the cake was a lie?
aaj111
That's a crappy looking Apoc. But it's still bad ass either way. Congrats CCP!
aaj111
on an eve cake you have to train two weeks to blow out the candles
Silverbackne
@Indigen:
lol
killah101
It's the wrong damned color. How'd they manage that?
Patrick Moore
@Kobun: Then it turns out there was no party there (the cake was made stale and planted there), they were given false information by the their 'friend' who is really planted there by a guy whose money was stolen from him by one of the party-goers. Swindled guy held the REAL party elsewhere. Unknown to him, the career criminal that is one the swindlers expected this possibility, so he the week before he promised one of the guys going to the real party he can date his sister, so if his boss did attempt shenanigans, he will spike the punch at the party with laxatives.
Of course, after spending the weekend in the toilet, guy who had his money stolen have just only plotted his vengeance...
syafiqjabar
@UsernameOfTheDead:
I wondered that too; I can't quite tell. If it's cake, it's got some crazy support built into it. It could also be sugar pieces pasted onto a frame.
It doesn't look quite plastic to me.
@Mancomb Seepgood: It's your own fault if you give all your money to the first shady 'banker' you meet.
syafiqjabar
@Jon: IIRC they pay their staff in foreign currency.
Indigen
@Mancomb Seepgood: There's nothing wrong with WoW, but people assume that because it has so many subscribers, that it's what MMO players want out of their games, but what developers don't realize is that they can never have those subscribers because the majority of them aren't your typical MMO players. They aren't going to play another MMO.
As for the developers not going after WoW, they wouldn't devote the kind of money they do into the games if they weren't expecting a piece of the "new MMO market" pie. The new MMO market being the millions brought in by WoW. I never said anything about developers designing their games to attract WoW numbers, I said they were spending development time and money on the game expecting a much higher number of subscribers now that WoW has broken through and brought the genre into mainstream. I was trying to explain that they will never get those numbers because the numbers brought into the market are almost entirely those that play WoW. (At least in the West)
RiotControl
@Mancomb Seepgood: Flowcharts!
@jamesjohnson01: No, it came from the game Portal. It's been waaay too overused and as we can clearly see from the picture the cake is not a lie.
-MasterDex-
Unfortunately the cake went stale by the time those attending made the journey to the destination, with all left to do at the party was to go over receipts and spreadsheets to determine the costs of the remaining balloons and decorations.
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: that stunt is really becoming boring.
Vidunder
@HueyFreeman:
Maybe consider looking into Jumpgate Evolution. I believe it's coming out around June or July, last I heard.
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...:
this joke is worse than first
@undefined: Another great example of why the comments with the most responses should not be the ones shown on the main page.
@Sevius: And it was awesome.
Eve, not so much.
@Remi: You'd only have a buck.
@mightyg:
And it keeps declining!
Morberis
@Mancomb Seepgood:
But they still make a game that is very VERY similar to WoW but worse. All they attempt are these little variations on WoW instead of doing something like Eve or GW.
Morberis
Fail - The icing asteroids are Veldspar!!!
Just kidding, congrats EVE! I wish I could purchase a second lifetime so that I could actually play your wonderful product.
@mchref="#c12637501">mcddufus: Jeans are old too, but you still wear them.
Wasn't the "The cake is a lie!" joke made here on Kotaku, too?
You people are grumpy.
FFXI is coming up on it's 7th anniversary. Suck on that Eve Online!
mightyg
@undefined: why does every cornball in this planet have to say that every time there's a kotaku post on game cakes? seriously, its no different than every "woot! first comment guy!", only its with cakes.
mcdufus
@BarbeQueQ: Yeah but it's also the only good free mmo out there. Things like Runes of Magic and Silkroad just don't compare. The problem is that devs DON'T go after WoW, not that they do. Because they don't. Look at any of the big name MMOs over the past couple of years and almost all of them have said something along the lines of "we're not going after wow, we're making a different game that will appeal to different people".
Stupid, stupid, stupid. WoW is so popular because its good. Everything is implemented well regardless of what the forum whiners are currently crying about. If it aint broke, don't fix it. And WoW is far from broken.
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: Old a year ago, almost ancient today.
...
Could it be retro?
No, it has to be funny or interesting to be retro.
@Ackers: And if I had a buck for every idiot who still thinks it's funny...
Remi
@HueyFreeman: I think that game already came out... and it was called Freelancer.
Eve online celebrates 6 years with yet more dull gameplay and over 200,000 new boxes of text for you to happily trawl through while you do absolutely nothing.
@dustintriplett:Nor me, when I tried it.
But the game makes some people happy, so kudos to that and congratulations to the publishers.
I honestly can't believe this game lasted six years. I tried but couldn't get into it. :/ Now the cake on the other hand, I'd pay a monthly fee for that.
six years?.. wow i never guessed it was that long..
@ChewyChew: So the cake is a lie.
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: I think you are late to the party buddy. The real cake was had 2 years ago.
ChewyChew
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: If had a £pound every time someone said that...
Ackers
That cake looks like its not finished.
Peter Pinto
-_-
woons
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...:
I actually knew this was gonna be the first comment before even reading it. My ESP is on track then.
Tomorrow, a troll will post on Kotaku!
CustomFirmware
@RiotControl: Well said.
And it's true, too. Just look at GW. The game's the complete opposite of WoW yet it has sold over 6 million copies.
BarbeQueQ
I know those are supposed to be asteroids, but however sugary they are, I'd feel more comfortable just taking a slice of deep space.
Gortexfogg
As an EVE player who has been around longer than the game has been public (Alpha 7, then Beta 2 onwards) I congratulate CCP for their fine work and wish continual growth.
To be fair to them people: They are an Icelandic company that somehow didn't struggle when Iceland's economy crashed. They deserve Kudos for that!
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except porn for one...: Is that a reference to something? I've never heard that before...
.......
Wow, I didn't realize this game had been out that long. I tried to play the free trial once, but my attention span didn't allow me to finish it. >.>
KirinRanger
Latest scans on the infrastructure of the edible substance indicate high dosage of sugar and an unknown substance presumed to be 'dark chocolate', which works as a base for the class B Ship positioned above it.
We're still awaiting for lab's results but we suspect an high level of awesomeness and nerd may be behind such item.
I want more niche titles like EVE. I don't like it when developers/publishes aim for WoW numbers. It's just not possible. 90% of the people playing WoW are not part of the MMO market. They are part of Blizzard's market and there is no reason to attempt to start designing a game with the goal of appealing to those millions. INNOVATE and turn respectable profits with a game unlike any other. Aim for the old 300,000 dream goal and not the 12 million subscriber goal.
RiotControl
They should make a Arcade EVE. That way I don't have to spend months waiting to build skills or whatever.
HueyFreeman
Is that topper edible?
UsernameOfTheDead
Oooh, cold blooded. A picture of a celebration you're not invited to, and an awesome cake they're not sharing with you. : [
kagekiri
The cake is a lie.
Congrats, CCP! Your game might be boring to ADHD folks like me, but the resultant drama has been VERY entertaining these last few weeks.
The Ugly Cake Contest called.. It wanted me to tell you that you won!
duroslotar
@aaj111: Yes
syafiqjabar
Well done, CCP. While EvE is not exactly my sort of game, I commend it on being what it is and for being that plucky little engine that could when bigger projects failed.
May your next six years be even more successful than your first.
@killah101: Not a joke. They do. Apparently it was only the banks and government in Iceland that didn't see the brick wall ahead.
Indigen
@Silverbackne:
well done, sir! i laughed my ass off
song
@syafiqjabar: Eh?
@Morberis: Sorry thats completely wrong. All everything from LOTRO to WAR did was copy WoWs UI, the gameplay was completely different in the majority of them. Where you're getting mixed up is you're not realising that 3rd person fantasy MMOs are going to have a lot of similarities. You don't hear people bitching that 1st person tactical shooters are all a horrible rip off of CS, yet many of them are very similar. The difference is that they improved on what CS had to offer and so many of them were good games.
@RiotControl: I have to disagree. It is perfectly possible for any MMO company to come along and steal tons of WoWs subs in a matter of months. One of the biggest issues MMOs have had recently is that they've been launching unfinished. When WoW launched it was unfinished too, but it had virtually no competition and still blew every other MMO out of the water, despite being unfinished.
What WoW did so well was firstly to give the players a choice. Do you want to solo or do you want to group? Do you want to PvE or PvP? What kind of server do you want? Dual wield, 1h and shield or 2h? Mix in a fairly decent character creation and WoW was going to get at least as many as Everquest. Then add to that the fact that WoW has always been casual friendly compared to other MMOs. The learning curve isn't that steep, the tutorial was pretty solid and the class tutorial (e.g. 1-60) was just the right length of time to level. Not too long like AoC and not too short like GW. But WoW did something else, something that worked hand in hand with the choices and the casualness and made it the success it is: there is always something to work towards no matter how long you've played. Cleared all the raids? Respec PvP to get rank 14 or now respec PvP to pwn the arena.
tldr: All an MMO dev needs to do is take the core of WoW and +1 it. Just improve on whats been done rather than trying to buck the trend. There are a ton of game from other genres that have tried to buck the trend and none of them have been great.
@Silverbackne:
Haha good one
@drownedphoniex will adverstive anything except...: I was gonna post this, but I see it's already been done. Good show, sir.
fuckin' gamers.
@ADVENTURE.exe: I am bookmarking that link, and you sir, win the internets!
@Indigen: Depends where they live. The Iceland office pays isk rates, Atlanta and China in dollars and... whatever China's currency is respectively.
@jamesjohnson01: No, it was made in the game portal itself. You have to play portal to get it, and in the game it wasnt even meant as a joke. it was meant as an ominous thing to say, seeing as though you're promised cake in the game.