A Look At The Active ISK Delta In December 2024

With a new year comes a look back at the past one. With the first full month after the Revenant expansion's launch in the books, the time has come to not only look at the Active ISK Delta in December, but for the entire year of 2024 as well.

From the December 2024 Monthly Economic Report

The Active ISK Delta is the net effect on the New Eden monetary supply of players leaving and returning to the game. The Active ISK Delta also includes any reductions due to any and all GM actions. In December, 64.3 trillion ISK left the economy from the movement of players into and out of the game. The change made the Active ISK Delta the biggest ISK sink in the New Eden economy for the second month in a row, dwarfing the 25.9 trillion ISK removed from the economy through transaction taxes.

Data from the last 24 MERs

Now, 64.3 trillion ISK seems like a rather large about of ISK. But the amount only represented a decrease of 2.6% of the total amount of money in the economy at the beginning of the month. Even with that amount leaving with departing players, the money supply still managed to grow 10.4 trillion ISK. I think for those worried about inflation, and the dev team's possible reaction to high inflation, the money supply growing only 0.4% is good news.

Data from 8 years of MERs

Normally I perform a year-over-year comparison. The December 2024 Active ISK Delta showed a 6.5% decline in ISK leaving the game compared to December 2023. But perhaps more importantly a new trend was established for the month of December. Looking back at the first 3 years of the Alpha/Omega era, the Active ISK Delta was positive, indicating players returning to the game. The pattern broke in 2020. No, I am not going to blame the debut of the Winter Nexus event that year. But for the three Decembers of the Second Expansion Era which began with the Uprising expansion, the Active ISK Delta was within plus or minus 5% of 66 trillion ISK. I will point to the reintroduction of yearly expansions in November as a major influence on that statistic, however.

Data going back 7 years

Looking at the entire quarter I think may show the popularity of the Havoc expansion of 2023 versus 2024's Revenant expansion. Since 2022 the fourth quarter encompasses the run-up to an expansion, the month the expansion launches, and then the first month of play afterwards. In the final quarter of 2023, player movement in and out of the game was a net ISK faucet, with an Active ISK Delta of 32.7 trillion ISK. In 2024, the faucet became a sink with players removing 88.4 trillion ISK from the New Eden economy on their way out the door.

The raw numbers are misleading

Of course we have to look at the full year numbers, and 2024 set a record with 509.3 trillion ISK removed from the economy due to players leaving the game. But I thought the number was very skewed, especially after discovering that the amount of ISK in the New Eden economy grew by 139.6% from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2024. So I decided to look at the numbers slightly differently.

Percentage of ISK departing game by year

And hey, look at that. When taking into account the growth of the money supply, 2024 doesn't look so bad after all. If fact, the 24.2% of the money supply that left the New Eden economy due to players moving in and out of EVE Online is slightly lower than the yearly average of 24.5% from 2017 to 2021. Perhaps more of interest, the year with two low-sec content heavy expansions only saw 9.1% of the ISK leave with players in 2023.

Lately I find writing these Active ISK Delta posts a little boring and wonder if the effort is worth doing. Then I get to the end of the year and get to pour over the data and produce an article where I learn something from the analysis. But if I am going to continue, I need to start taking inflation more into account, don't I?