A Look At The Active ISK Delta For May 2025

On Wednesday CCP Games published the May monthly economic report (MER) for EVE Online's Tranquility shard. Before taking a look at the Active ISK Delta for last month I'd like to point out the events and trends developers considered most noteworthy in the economy.

Economic Summary

• 9% Increase in Production, April vs May 2025. Mining and Destruction are stable.
• MPI continues to fall, but at a much slower rate than April 2025.

It's likely we are going to remove the Import, Export, and Trade Balance plots from the MER, due to the data-source being deprecated. We are working with the EVE Development Team to get a new data source that will give us more verbose data, enabling us to better calculate Imports, Exports and Trade balance.

With the general MER housekeeping notes out of the way we can proceed to looking at player counts and the money supply. I've written over the last couple of months about the possibility of an unprecedented event: positive values for the Active ISK Delta in consecutive months. When Jester's average concurrent user graph came out over the weekend the possibility became more realistic.

Jester's average concurrent user graph

With the late surge at the launch of Legion plus the Imperium going to war, May's peak ACU exceeded April's. The publication of the May MER showed another positive Active ISK Delta.

Active ISK Delta values since January 2022

Why is the Active ISK Delta important? The Active ISK Delta is the net effect on the money supply of players leaving and returning to the game, including all GM actions. With the elimination of the intellectual property revenue from Pearl Abyss' quarterly earnings calls in the fourth quarter of 2024 determining the financial health of CCP will require diving into the in-game statistics of the studio's games. While sites like EVE-Offline.net do a fine job of providing counts, the Active ISK Delta provides a unique insight into whether players are returning to the game.

Historic changes in the money supply in May due to the Active ISK Delta

Since the beginning of 2018 the month with the most positive Active ISK Delta values is May. Of the 13 times in that time the Active ISK Delta exceeded 0, 4 have occurred in May. Last month's growth of the money supply of 0.2% was below the average of 1.1% from the years 2018 to 2024.

The year's peak concurrent user count occurred in June

Can the Active ISK Delta remain positive for 3 consecutive months? I doubt it but the possibility exists. On Sunday 1 June Tranquility experienced its highest peak concurrent users mark since the 40,165 recorded on 19 November 2023. A more realistic question is whether the Active ISK Delta is positive for the second quarter. Since the beginning of 2018 only three fiscal quarters have seen positive Active ISK Deltas. The last time was Q4 2023 with the launch of the Havoc expansion. I really wish Pearl Abyss still reported game revenue by IP just to see if the player retention and return of veteran players made a big financial impact.