EVE Online now has over 500,000 subscribers
And Retribution is the "most commercially successful expansion CCP has ever launched"
EVE Online, the massive space trading game, now has more than 500,000 subscribers according to CCP. It's a fitting milestone for a game ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
"This is a really big deal for us," said CCP's chief marketing officer David Reid.
"This is a ten year old game that has continued to grow every single year of its existence. It's very different from other games in the industry that we've all seen have had their peaks and have continued to decline, particularly in the subscription model."
Reid credited the rise to a number of things, the game's eighteenth free expansion, Retribution, which he called "the most commercially successful expansion CCP has ever launched," and the recent and unexpected piece of emergent gameplay, the Battle of Asakai.
He also referenced the game's recent release in China, and said the company was off to a "very strong start" in the country.
Both Reid and CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson also spoke about the recent PlayStation 4 announcement, and how it would affect EVE Online console spin-off, Dust 514.
"We saw what they announced, and of course we were part of the briefing for that," said Reid.
"It seems like the best idea in the world to have a free product on a platform that's about to transition"
Hilmar Veigar Petursson
"We saw in particular what David Perry talked about with Gaikai and how Sony is exploring this and at this point we have nothing to add to what Sony announced. We're excited about what they're doing, we're excited about our prospects on PlayStation 3 with over 70 million consoles out there now."
He was confident that those consoles would stay in living rooms around the world for years to come and it was a "tremendously exciting commercial opportunity" to be a free-to-play FPS on the machine at this point in its lifecycle.
"If there's anything we've learned over the past decade at CCP it's about focus and execution," explained Petursson.
"Just seeing the early numbers and the reaction of the audience we now have in the open beta of Dust the opportunity is even bigger and more exciting than we ever thought. Now we're closing in on 80 million PS3s all around the world and the product that we have, which is one of the first free-to-play experiences on the PlayStation 3, it seems like the best idea in the world to have a free product on a platform that's about to transition."