EVE Online Slipped A Little In March 2023

Looking back at March, activity declined just a little compared to February when viewed on an average daily basis. Compared to March 2022, however, the statistics show the game is in a much healthier state.

Activity from April 2022 to March 2023

From Jester's average concurrent user chart, we see the ACU during March fluxuated between 19,000 and 20,000 each day. A slight decline from February, but a lot better than the precipitous decline that occurred in March 2022 due to the impact of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022. Hopefully Tranquility will see higher year-over-year active user counts when the next expansion launches sometime in the second quarter of 2023.

A major part of Uprising was an effort to improve factional warfare. The Shadow War event led to increased PvP activity in low security space in March. Compared to February, players lost 21.8% more ships each day in low sec. The eye popping number is the year-over-year figure. Average daily player ship losses jumped from 5314 in March 2022 to 9156 in March 2023, an increase of 72.3%. The implementation of Direct Enlistment did not cannibalize null sec PvP kill numbers, as those only fell by 55 per day compared to February. Compared to March 2022, 10.7% more ships died each day in March 2023 than one year before.

The big downside in the March data involved players killing NPCs. The numbers were down on an average daily basis across high (-11.8%), low (-5.6%) , and null security space (-5.1%) on a month-over-month basis. But the numbers were much better than in March 2022, with NPC kills increasing by 8.1% in high sec, 17.4% in low sec, and a staggering 33.5% in null sec.

I realize that the numbers for last year were suppressed by real world wars inhibiting the ability of a significant portion of the player base losing the ability to access the internet and the international banking system. But the numbers are still up over pre-Uprising levels. Hopefully CCP is able to build on the success of Uprising and increase activity even more with the next EVE Online expansion.