A Look At The Active ISK Delta In January 2025

Today CCP Games published the January 2025 monthly economic report for EVE Online. The developers included some interesting analysis about the activity in the New Eden economy.

Economic Summary

• The mining value saw a significant increase in January, with an average daily rise of 24.8% compared to December. Meanwhile, production value experienced an uptick of 1.3%, and destruction value remained steady since September 2024.
  
  
• Both ore mining and gas harvesting volumes grew in January, increasing by 7.6% and 9.2%, respectively. In contrast, ice mining volume dropped by 25.4%, attributed to the conclusion of the Winter Nexus event and Volatile Ice Storms not being available for most of January.
  
  
• The end of Winter Nexus also led to a decline in Overseer Personal Effects.
  
  
• The MPI rose by 7.7% compared to December (a 32.8% year-over-year increase), driven primarily by a sharp rise in Morphite prices during the first half of January.
  
  
• Module and ship prices have continued to rise since October, showing year-over-year growth of 3.6% and 1.5%, respectively.

Over the last year or two I've stuck to looking at the money supply. In January, the money supply declined by 0.3%. Coincidently, the average price of PLEX in The Forge, home of Jita, New Eden's primary trade hub, also declined by 0.3% from the last day of December to the last day of January. And the biggest ISK sink keeping the growth of the money supply in check last month is known as the Active ISK Delta.

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 January, 69.0 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 third month in a row, nearly doubling the 35.3 trillion ISK removed from the economy through transaction taxes. 

All told, the net effect of player movement removed 2.8% of the ISK in the economy from the game. The amount was 4.7 trillion ISK more ISK removed than in December 2024. To put the amount into perspective, using the average price of PLEX at the end of January, the Active ISK Delta  was enough to purchase 23,000 months of Omega (aka subscription) time. Or, in other words, slightly more than the average number of concurrent users logged in over the past week.

Speaking of context the above graph opened my eyes to the need to adjust how I analyze the size of the Active ISK Delta. Over short periods of time, reporting on raw ISK numbers works fairly well. But from the beginning of 2018 to the beginning of 2025, the money supply grew 114.2%, from 1,139.8 billion ISK to 2,441.3 billion ISK. In comparison, over the same time the price of a single PLEX rose from 3.2 million ISK to 6 million ISK, an 87.5% increase. So yes, the Active ISK Delta recorded 50% more ISK removed in January 2025 than occurred in January 2018. But compared to the size of the money supply, 3.5% of the money in the game left with players in January 2018 compared to the 2.8% disappearing last month.

I know that a lot of people are stating January's Active ISK Delta is an indication of a lot of people leaving the game. And just based on instinct I want to agree. But the Active ISK Delta shows a lot of ISK leaving the game over the past six months or so with player levels remaining fairly constant. Staying at a plateau isn't really a great situation. Preferably player logins and activity would increase, which I don't see. But one thing I do see is a need to look at the metric is a slightly different way.