Flying Solo In EVE: The 2026 Roadmap

I always start these posts with a look at the weekly average number of concurrent users based on the data from Chribba's EVE-Offline.net. 

The average concurrent user count for the week ending 1 Feb 2026

The average line dropped by 1000 users last week. Yes, some technical difficulties resulted in service interruptions on both Thursday and Saturday but I don't think by enough to drop the number by itself. 

The PLEX market thru 2 February 2026

The price of PLEX remained steady lastweek, only dropping 1% in price during the week. The sales in the cash shop concentrated on mastery packs and remastered value packs. One interesting detail to observe in the near future is whether the first week of the month results in higher PLEX sales.

The reason for wanting to highlight the above information is the leadership of EVE's development seem pretty pleased with themselves with the state of the game.  I'll drop the video into the post below.

The video is part of the introduction of the roadmap for EVE Online for 2026. 

The roadmap is pretty basic and gives a 30,000 foot view (10,000 meters?) of what players can expect over the next 11 months. First, we get two expansions in the now familiar second and fourth quarters of the year. The word is the expansions will concentrate on factional warfare, meaning the Q1 entry for the Gallente election will probably impact at least the summer expansion.

In addition to the two expansions, expect four other major content drops in 2026. The first two will appear in the next few weeks. The EVE Evolved initiative is usually used to update the code base and functions of this game that will celebrate its 23rd year of operating in May. The last EVE Evolved in August of last year concentrated on updating the ESI as well as Upscaling & Ray-traced Shadows as well as an initiative from the art team titled Smoke, Fire & Smart Lights.

In addition to one in March will be another set of updated planned in the third quarter ahead of the winter expansion. The developers are only planning one major mid-expansion patch, this one for the Catalyst expansion, coming up in the next few weeks.

In addition to EVE Online, 2026 is the year EVE Vanguard enters Alpha. The roadmap shows a major event occurring in Q3 while Steam lists the same time period as the release of CCP's new first-person-shooter on the platform. The roadmap lists Vanguard as beginning a playtest on Steam in the final three months of the year.

Finally players will see the usual events such as Capsuleer Day celebrating the anniversary of the launch of the game, the Crimson Harvest and the Winter Nexus.

The post and video had more information but I just wanted to provide a quick road map. We'll probably see more details as time goes on.