What is Eve Online?

Eve online is a space based, persistent massively multiplayer online role-playing game made by CCP Games. Its initial release date was May 6, 2003, but it is still being developed to this day and played actively by about 25,000 people. But how does an MMO stay active and relevant for almost two decades? I believe that Eve Online’s success is due to its innovations on creating a single server sandbox where each players can make an immense impact and its interesting business model.

What makes Eve Online so cool and unique?

One of Eve Online’s innovations was its use of a player-based economy. Almost every item in the game has been forged or manufactured by another player. In order to make a purchase or sell to a market, players must dock their ship to a space station. Depending on the game’s supply and demand, the prices of items can change, creating a stock-market like system that can be influenced by the players in game! For example, minerals are needed to build ships that are sold on the market, so if a player becomes as pirate and starts attacking mining players, then there will be less minerals available in the market to build ships, therefore the overall prices of ships will increase.

Politics and the Butterfly Effect

Eve Online also included guilds and player-controlled territories. Players can band together to form corporations, multiple corporations can band together to make alliances, and alliances can become powerful enough to control entire sectors of space in Eve. Alliances can end up being made of thousands of people, so ranking and command hierarchies are created by players to better organize themselves. Each claimable sector in space has its own unique set of resources that helps players become wealthy, so there is a natural desire for competition and wars between alliances for controlling the richest sectors of space.

The politics of Eve Online are very unique and entirely player driven. There are stories online about how players gain the trust of a corporation for years just to betray and rob them. For managing an alliance and controlling a sector of space there is a lot of housekeeping to be done, fleets need to be deployed to fight battles and maintain control of their sector, every player-owned space station needs to be armed and refueled, recruiters and human resources managers need to review applications and perform interviews. These tasks would be impossible for a single player to handle, so responsibility needs to be divided to other players that you ‘trust’. This divided responsibility allows players with bad intentions, to embezzle or outright steal from the corporation. This was the first game where I had to learn about internal security and needed to keep an eye out for spies and thieves in my corporation. Later when I left my old corporation and joined Goon Swarm, one of the largest alliance of corporations in Eve online, we had an entire department for espionage called ‘The Black Hand’, which sent spies and caused internal conflict among our rivals. This department once caused an entire alliance to collapse because a player in charge of maintaining space stations was ‘incentivized’ by ‘The Black Hand’ to let the stations run out of fuel and not pay their territory upkeep.

Corporation Organization

When I played Eve Online about two years ago, I joined a corporation as a pilot and was eventually promoted to fleet commander and then to director. Generally, a corporation is led by a CEO, who then delegates responsibilities and tasks to his/her directors, each director has their own set of commanders and managers, and finally each pilot joins whichever department or event they’re interested in. Corporations can be specialized, such as a group of only miners who like to play together, or corporations can be more diverse with different departments in security, industry, and mining.

Eve Online’s Business model

Eve Online’s business model is subscription based for full access to the game, and recently they incorporated a limited-access free to play model. Free and paying players can go anywhere in game, but free players are limited in the types of ships and equipment that they can use. This free model helps to introduce players who may be reluctant to play for a subscription and to increase the player population. Every year, CCP Games releases a new major update to Eve Online, which adds more content and polish to the game, such as in exploration, or player versus player combat, or industry. All of this content attracts players who are interested in different aspects of the game, there are players who only like to explore, some only want to face the thrill of combat as a pirate, and some only want to manufacture ships and equipment in industry. All of these players with different interests mingle with each other and this web of interactions brings an interesting life to Eve Online. For example, a player decides they want to mine some minerals today, but another pirate player finds and attacks them, so the mining player has to hire mercenary players to escort them, and it turns out that the pirate is actually a fleet commander in a pirate corporation so when he sees the mercenaries he instead brings a fleet of pirates for a battle.

Conclusion

Overall, Eve Online incorporates a unique player impacted sandbox game with a business model that allows for fresh content to be added for decades and increase the value of the game.

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