The September 2023 Active ISK Faucet: The Starfield Effect

CCP published the September 2023 monthly economic report (MER) for EVE Online yesterday. One question I had for September was, "How badly did Starfield affect EVE Online?"

The ACU is still up year-over-year

Jester's average concurrent user graph shows a sharp decrease at the beginning of September. Starfield released on 6 September with an early release date of 1 September. The timing seems to fit, but what does the Active ISK Delta show?

Big swings in the Active ISK Delta recently

September's Active ISK Delta of -78.1 trillion ISK is part of a recent trend of widely varying amounts. Last month's total is the 3rd largest decline caused by players leaving the game (either through bans or not logging in withing 30 days) since December 2017. While a month with a positive Active ISK Delta usually are followed by a larger than negative ISK value, I imagine many EVE players would find a single-player Bethesda space RPG irresistible, at least for a couple of weeks.

A positive Active ISK Delta in October would not surprise me. Besides the usual October return of players to EVE, the runup to the Havoc expansion may attract more players back to New Eden than usual. I should add my expectations are not just based on raw statistics. Over the holiday weekend, the peak number of concurrent users exceeded 30,000 on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. EVE Offline is showing a one-week ACU of over 21,000 players each day.

EVE-Offline showing a true 21K average concurrent players

But for now, I'm attributing the September Active ISK Delta to players getting caught up in playing Starfield. Next month we'll probably know for sure.