Curious about how many people are playing Star Trek Online at the moment? A new Space.com interview with associate art director Thomas Marrone and writer Paul Reed includes an actual number of players, claiming that the playerbase is over 2.5 million players. Now, this is also an interview that claims the game was developed by Cryptic Studios and Perpetual Entertainment (stop laughing) and unnecessarily hedges by calling STO one of the most successful online RPGs set in the Star Trek universe, but we can assume that playerbase figure is generally accurate. It’s interesting in light of the 6 million figure noted back when Perfect World Entertainment was acquired; it’s possible that was lifetime players and this is active or current or recent players, but there’s no clarification provided.
The main meat of the interview is discussing the integration between IDW’s Star Trek comics featuring the Mirror Universe and the extensive amount of Mirror Universe content available in STO, with both IDW’s writers and Cryptic’s team discussing how good it is to have a unified and understood basis for both teams working on the IP. Marrone even discusses the impact of new Star Trek media on the game as well as what it means for fans in general:To be running concurrently with new Star Trek TV and even influence it has been an amazing development for us as a game that is over 12 years old. And between 2009 and 2018, we were one of the only multi-media ways you could experience Star Trek. We took that responsibility seriously, and now to be passing that torch on to the new shows is a great way to evolve and come to the next step of the game’s lifespan.
