A Look At March 2024's Active ISK Delta

CCP Games published EVE Online's monthly economic report (MER) for March 2024 today. In an effort to keep the EVE Online community team from labeling me a "tardy capsuleer", I dug into the report to gather the latest information on the Active ISK Delta.

From the March 2024 MER

Before continuing, I do want to make note of a change to the way the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is calculated. The following items were removed due to them really only consisting of trade between players and NPCs and thus are fixed.

• Overseer Personal Effects
• Sleeper Components
• Triglavian Data
• Rogue Drone Analysis Data
• Bounty Encrypted Bonds

These items consist of some of the biggest ISK faucets in the game. While not directly affecting the Active ISK Delta, they do have an impact on inflation, or lack thereof, in New Eden. Removing these items with fixed costs should result in a small increase in the CPI. At least, I assume so.

Post pandemic Active ISK Delta

The Active ISK Delta, as defined by CCP, is the net effect of ISK coming and going with player accounts, including all GM actions. If the number is positive, players are returning to the game. If the numbers are negative, then players are leaving the game with more money than those returning to the game. The number also counts the ISK that left the game from those who did not log in for the past 30 days.

After three months of near historic negative Active ISK Deltas, March saw the metric rise to only -29.2 trillion ISK. While an improvement, the Active ISK Delta dropped 62.2% compared to March 2023. For the first quarter of 2024, a total of 166 trillion ISK left the New Eden money supply compared to the 54.2 trillion ISK that did so in the first quarter of 2023.

One item of note is that players leaving the game was not the biggest ISK sink in March. Transaction taxes exceeded the amount of ISK withdrawn from the game, 35.1 trillion ISK to 29.2 trillion ISK. As a result, the money supply grew 1.2% up to 2.1 quadrillion ISK. To keep the money supply from growing, the Active ISK Delta needed to reach -54.2 trillion ISK.

Jester's Average Concurrent User graph, April 2023 to March 2024

For April I will keep an eye on whether both the number of average concurrent users and the Active ISK Delta increases (i.e. turns positive). In the month before Viridian, the Active ISK Delta was -3 trillion ISK before increasing to 104.5 trillion ISK during the expansions launch month. Will EVE experience something similar in the lead up to the next expansion?