EVE Online's Peak Concurrent User Record Has Been Public Since 2013. The Trend Since Is Also Public.

CCP's own announcements and community-aggregated Steam data put the numbers on the record. Here they are, with their sources.

Most of the figures on this site were first said out loud in a hall like this, in a slide with a version number on it.

Photo: BlizzCon opening ceremony · Wikimedia Commons

The Figures, Attributed

EVE Online's all-time peak concurrent user count of approximately 65,303 was recorded in January 2013 and announced by CCP Games at the time as part of the game's tenth-anniversary promotional material. The figure has been cited in subsequent industry reporting and remains the baseline against which every later EVE concurrent-player figure is measured.

CCP Games, headquartered in Reykjavik, does not publish a regular subscriber count and has not done so since the mid-2010s. The studio's public communications shifted toward registered-account milestones and event-driven PCU announcements rather than recurring monthly disclosures. By 2018 the company had been acquired by Pearl Abyss, the South Korean developer behind Black Desert Online, in a deal Pearl Abyss valued at approximately $425 million — a transaction documented in Pearl Abyss's own investor filings.

EVE Online is also sold on Steam, and SteamDB ↗ maintains a concurrent-player chart for the title. The Steam figures do not capture the full player population — a substantial portion of the active base still connects through the standalone launcher — but they provide the only unbroken public time series available for the game. SteamDB records EVE Online's Steam-side PCU at figures well below the 2013 all-time peak, with the Steam channel consistently registering in the low-to-mid thousands on peak days through 2023 and 2024.

CCP has continued to publicise event-driven player surges. The Invasion Chapter 3 period in late 2019 generated a wave of returning players that the studio publicised without attaching a precise PCU figure. The Uprising expansion, released in November 2022, was similarly accompanied by positive player-activity statements from CCP rather than a hard concurrent number.

The gap between the 2013 record and the present Steam trend is not itself evidence that the game is failing; EVE's revenue model shifted substantially after it moved to a free-to-play Alpha/Omega account structure in November 2016, meaning registered-account volume and paying-account volume diverged from that point. A lower PCU in a partially free-to-play environment carries different revenue implications than the same figure under the earlier mandatory-subscription model.

What the public record does establish is the shape of the curve: a 2013 ceiling, a mid-decade plateau, and a Steam-side trend that community databases can chart in detail. CCP's selective disclosure policy means the full picture requires combining the studio's own dated announcements with third-party aggregation — neither source alone is complete.