EVE Online celebrates its 6th anniversary today and to mark the occasion CCP has announced that with the recent release of EVE Online: Apocrypha to the retail stores, the number of active subscribers has passed the 300,000 mark. As EVE subscriber numbers are still rising (up by 22% in the past five months) this would mean that EVE Online is passing Warhammer Online numbers which, according to the EA financial reporting were at 300,000 at the end of March - and the general trend for Warhammer has been that the numbers have been slipping ever since it peaked at around 750,000 subscribers.
A snippet from the official CCP PR:
This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to our latest free expansion EVE Online: Apocrypha and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we've had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers. That doesn't include trial accounts. We've broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn't think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE's boundless potential.
That would put EVE Online as the number two western MMO on the market when you count by the number of active monthly subscriptions. EVE Online is surpassed only by a couple of Asian titles (Lineage, Lineage II, Final Fantasy IX and Runescape) and, naturally, by World of Warcraft. EVE Online has already long since bypassed Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest II and Age of Conan - with Age of Conan diving down from over 700,000 subscribers at peak to under 100,000 by the latest available information.
So, in other words, everyone is playing World of Warcraft and the only other notable western MMO that is actually growing is EVE Online.
