EVE General Discussion

Or the more likely option is that subscriber numbers are still going up but even less people give a **** about the CSM then ever before?

In this case, CCP should release the number. Just to kill rumour of this kind.

Yes I do, random goon. This information wasn't part of your "trade secrets" for the first 9 years of eve. So what's so secret about the sub number of 2013?

Yup....

The employee who did all the analysis in the blog clearly had the raw number available, but chose not to reveal it.
So really only a couple potential reasons why it was not revealed.

1. CCP is going in a new direction and not releasing sub numbers anymore, good or bad. But we have seen zero comments from management as to why that new direction.
2. It was an accidental omission.

Reason #2 is utterly implausible, and reason #1, well, why would they suddenly change?

And best thing, CCP is doubling down in steering the game in the direction that created this very likely subscription drop.
An enormously bad business decision.

They still don't have to disclose them to you or anybody for that matter. There are plenty of excuses, and you've got no reason to know them except for your own baseless and worthless speculation.

The number is probably down and that's why they're keeping it a secret but so what...

CCP releases it and all the sudden 100 posts with the topic "I told you this would happen when CCP nerfed sentry drones" appear.

In actuality it's probably down because of the economy. I'm not sure about the rest of the world but in the USA it's been on a downhill slide for the past few years. Most people cut stuff like video games and entertainment first.

PCU counts are definitely down on Tranquality (according to eve-offline), we've dipped to 2011 levels, I would expect that count to spike a bit around the next expansion as it usually does, it already appears to be trending back upwards. New eggs also seem to be back to trending upwards. Historically PCU is usually down for the few months leading up to an expansion. The Chinese server Serenity on the other hand has seen PCU counts trending steadily upwards since the beginning of the year, and their subs definitely count.

You could draw the conclusion the low PCU count on Tranq means overall subs have also been down, which could potentially affect voting turnout.

Of course only CCP knows for sure, but I would suspect that if sub numbers are down significantly, no one at CCP is going to be rushing to publish that info given the amount of other bad news they have had to deal with recently.

Actually gaming and home entertainment usually stay steady if not increase during a bad economy. Since people will cut back on more expensive forms of entertainment like going out, movies, dinners etc and stick to things like Netflix, Hulu, MMOs, etc which is generally cheaper in the long run(1 month for most MMOs costs less than a single night out). Not to mention Eve has a system that actually allows people to play to pay, which can negate the prioritizing income.

The ammount of people voting in the elections in the real world goes up and down as well, doesn't mean a ton of people suddenly died or left the country if the numbers dropped.

As they point out, it's not 'just' that the votes decreased. In and of itself that's interesting, but not alarming. Taken as part of the bigger picture though (concurrency, layoffs, game cancellations, lots of announcements of staff jumping ship to other companies) it's somewhat more concerning. CCP did not cancel WoD, as an example, despite the very small actual profit they made in last years financials.