A Look At April 2024's Active ISK Delta

CCP Games published EVE Online's monthly economic report (MER) for April 2024 yesterday. While all the financial information about video gaming is looking back at the first quarter, followers of the EVE economy are already examining second quarter data.

From the April 2024 Monthly Economic Report

The two biggest money sinks in EVE Online in April were death and taxes, not necessarily in that order. The biggest individual ISK sink were transaction taxes, mostly if not entirely from sales on the market. I'm still a little fuzzy on the concept as defined in the data. If broker fees are added to the 35.7 trillion ISK collected in transition taxes, the process of buying and selling things in New Eden added up to 47 trillion ISK.

The death part of the equation is the 24.5 trillion ISK removed from the money supply as measured by the Active ISK Delta.  The metric, 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.

A historical view of the Active ISK Delta

If history repeats itself, we may see a positive Active ISK Delta and players return to the game for the anniversary celebration held on 6 May. The economy did see a 16% month-over-month reduction in ISK leaving the economy due to players winning and losing EVE. Year-over-year, however, the Active ISK Delta experienced a 59.1% increase in the ISK sink the metric measures.

The number of average concurrent users from 1 May 23 to 30 April 24

Overall, the Active ISK Delta still seems to track with the number of players logging into the game. The 30-day average slid upward a bit and so did the value of the Active ISK Delta, from -29.2 trillion ISK up to -24.5 trillion ISK. But perhaps the biggest news is the money supply in New Eden growing 1.4% in April. If the money sinks don't perform up to the developers expectations, players may see another effort to reign in ISK faucets.