Don’t count EVE Online as over and out just yet. The long-running space sandbox reported a remarkably good year for 2016, posting an increase in players and profits from the year previous.
CCP announced this week that its revenues rose from $65.7M in 2015 to $86.1M in 2016, representing a healthy 30% increase. Even better, the game’s daily active user count doubled over the year. These could well be thanks to EVE’s shift to a free-to-play model, which propelled the game up to over 50,000 concurrent users by last November. The company also reported that its VR titles broke even in 2016.
Over on the player side of things, a massive swarm of organized gankers held its annual “Burn Jita” event over the past weekend. Over $13,000 of victim ships were torched when hundreds of suicide pilots flocked to a trade hub in cheaply outfitted ships to take down freighters and other defenseless ships.
“It’s a logistical nightmare that requires a team of people to sort out and get their ducks in a row,” one organizer said in an interview. “Literally every weeknight and some weekend nights for the last two weeks have been spent preparing for Burn Jita in one way or another.”
