CCP Games, due to the nature of its games, has a smaller-than-normal potential player pool. The Icelandic game studio is very fond of full-loot PvP sandbox games. The company's flagship game, EVE Online, fits the description and a game under development, EVE Frontier, falls within the same genre. Which means the studio must reduce friction to player interest in other areas to build up a healthy player base for its games.
Heading into next week's EVE Fanfest CCP will showcase two games under development, EVE Frontier and a first person shooter, EVE Vanguard. I thought I'd post the known system requirements for the two games and compare them to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for March 2025. Will the hardware requirements keep the number of potential players down?
First up is EVE Frontier. According to the FAQ, the minimum and recommended requirements are the same as EVE Online's. Makes sense since both use the Carbon engine.
Minimum Requirements:
- OS: MacOS or Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Dual Core @ 2.0 GHz
- RAM: 4 GB or higher
- Video: AMD Radeon 5450 or NVIDIA GeForce 420 or better with at least 1024 MB VRAM
Recommended Requirements
- OS: MacOS or Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel i7-7700 or AMD Ryzen 7 1700 @ 3.6 GHz or greater
- RAM: 16 GB or higher
- Video: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060, AMD Radeon RX 580 or better with at least 4 GB VRAM
As expected, the operating system is pretty universal amongst Steam users. Ninety-six percent of Steam users run either Windows 10 or 11 and another 1.5% run a Mac operating system. The CPU speed also should not pose an issue. For the minimum requirements, over 99% of Steam users have CPUs at least 2.0 GHz or faster. The recommended speed, though, is a little restrictive. While Steam doesn't use 3.6 GHz as a breakpoint, only 2.5% of Steam users own a CPU 3.7 GHz or faster.
The news is better on the number of physical cores. Basically only 0.03% of Steam users own a computer with only 1 processing core. For the recommended requirements, the listed cards have 6 cores. A total of 79% of Steam users own cards with 6 or more cores.
The amount of RAM required to run the two games is also a bonus. For the minimum required 4 GB of RAM, 99.97% of Steam users have the required memory installed. For the recommended amount, 85.5% of Steam users have 16 GB of RAM in their computers.
To give a hint as to whether the average Steam user has a video card capable of running EVE Frontier, the median user owns a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. 94.9% of Steam users have the 1 GB of video RAM required to run the games at minimum level and 84.9% at the recommended level.
When we get to EVE Vanguard the hardware requirements are a little higher.
Minimum:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (21H2/19044) / Windows 11 64-bit
- Processor: Intel i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Recommended:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (Latest) / Windows 11 64-bit (Latest)
- Processor: Intel i5-11600K / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
The processors listed on Steam are a little faster than those required for Online & Frontier but can use the older i5 processors instead of the newer i7 & i9 processors. Still the processor speeds appear to be a touch faster for the system minimum (2.8 GHz) and a little slower at the recommended level (3.6 GHz). Still, only about 32% of Steam users have the required hardware to run Vanguard at minimum specs while the recommended processors are the same as EVE Online's.
Another difference is the required amount of RAM for the minimum requirements. Don't try running Vanguard with anything less than 16 GB. While 84.9% of Steam users already have 16 GB of RAM installed a small proportion of EVE players trying to play Vanguard may wind up with an unpleasant surprise.
And finally, as one might expect from an FPS game, the video card required to play Vanguard is much more powerful. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT listed on Steam, for example, has 16 GB of VRAM while the NVIDIA RTX 3080 comes with 10 GM & 12 GB variants. Overall, probably only 30% of Steam users own the recommended hardware to run Vanguard but nearly 2/3 can run the game on the minimum specifications.
I didn't realize until writing this post about just how much more powerful a computer needs to be to run EVE, whether Frontier or Online, compared to a FPS game like Vanguard. How much does will that cut down on adoption of Vanguard by EVE players. After all, buying a Playstation 5 is only $500 or so. Purchasing a computer just to run Vanguard seems like a bigger ask.
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