EVE Online Had A Massive Year
EVE Online has always been known for its gigantic space battles, brutal politics, and a player driven economy that feels closer to a real market than a typical game. In its latest end of year stats, developer CCP Games revealed just how big 2025 really was for the long running space MMO.
This year saw two major expansions that kept the game fresh for both veterans and new players. The highlights were player created freelance missions and a major overhaul to mining, alongside the introduction of five new ships. For a game that has been running for more than two decades, EVE Online is still growing, changing, and occasionally blowing itself up in spectacular fashion.
The new freelance mission system is especially interesting. Instead of relying only on developer made quests, EVE now lets players design missions for other players. That can mean anything from simple hauling jobs to dangerous mercenary contracts out in lawless space. It turns the player base into a kind of gig economy where veterans can set up tasks and new players or smaller groups can earn rewards by taking them on.
The updated mining experience also gives industrial players more to do and more reasons to log in. Since mining and production sit at the core of EVE’s economy, changes here ripple through the entire game. More ore, more materials, more ships, and ultimately more things to explode.
The Ridiculous Scale Of Destruction And Industry
CCP’s numbers show that players fully embraced the new content. Across the year, EVE pilots created 9,130 freelance missions for others to accept. That is thousands of custom jobs made by the community itself, on top of everything the game already offers.
Of the five new ships, the Pioneer clearly became a favorite. Players manufactured this ship 71,873 times in 2025, and 4,513 of those were destroyed. In EVE, ships are not cheap consumables. Every loss means time, resources, logistics, and usually a little bit of heartbreak. Seeing thousands of a single new ship type already blown up shows just how eager players are to throw themselves into danger.
Structures took a beating too. Across the year players destroyed 12,406 Upwell structures. These are player built stations and installations that can act as bases, industrial hubs, or strategic footholds. Knocking one down is a serious operation and usually means long planning, large fleets, and high stakes fights. Each structure loss does not just represent a cool explosion. It is a hit to an alliance’s logistics, storage, and political influence. And of course it triggers massive in game insurance claims.
But the really mind bending stat is the amount of in game currency that went up in flames. CCP reports that 1,142,260,784,813,930 ISK was destroyed over the course of the year. That is more than one quadrillion ISK. You can think of it as ten raised to the power of fifteen, or just an absurd mountain of space money that no longer exists.
To get a rough idea of what that means in real world value, you have to look at PLEX. PLEX is EVE’s premium currency that players buy with real money and then trade for ISK in game. CCP does not allow direct selling of ISK for cash, so the value is always a bit fuzzy and depends on market rates and bulk discounts.
At the time of calculation, a pack of 20,000 PLEX from the official store costs 650 dollars. That puts each PLEX at about 0.0325 dollars. In game, that single PLEX trades for around six million ISK. If you follow that math through, one ISK is worth about 5.4166 times ten to the minus nine dollars. Multiply that by the quadrillion ISK destroyed and you get a rough figure of around 6.19 million dollars worth of value evaporated in a year.
Of course this is only a back of the envelope calculation. Exchange rates shift, bundle pricing changes and CCP does not want ISK tied too cleanly to real currency. Still, it gives a sense of the scale. Players essentially burned several million dollars worth of virtual assets through wars, piracy, bad decisions and glorious last stands.
On the industrial side, the numbers are just as wild. Players mined a total of 2,214,975,610,330 cubic metres of ore. From all that rock they refined 380,532,846,570,048 ISK worth of materials. Mining operations in EVE are not just sleepy background activities. They feed shipbuilding, fuel production, structure construction, and the entire war machine that drives the game’s biggest conflicts.
A Game That Celebrates Its Own Mythology
CCP has never been shy about leaning into EVE Online’s reputation as a harsh, sometimes downright cruel universe where losses matter. The studio celebrates its history with the same sense of drama players bring to their wars. Earlier in the year CCP announced one of its most unusual projects yet: a medieval style tome of epic poetry based on EVE, written on calfskin and literally inked with the blood of players who donated.
It sounds outrageous but also fits perfectly with the game’s vibe. EVE is full of legendary battles, betrayals and heists that players still talk about years later. Turning that history into a physical saga feels like the natural extension of a game that treats its universe almost like real history.
When you put all of this together the numbers, the blood written book, the endless player drama it is clear that 2025 was another defining year for EVE Online. New systems like freelance missions keep the sandbox evolving. Fresh ships add new tools and new ways to die. The economy continues to churn at a scale that few other games can come close to matching.
If you have ever been curious about a space MMO where every ship loss really hurts, every haul of ore matters and every war leaves a mark on the universe, EVE’s latest year in numbers shows that its galaxy is still very much alive and dangerously busy.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/eve-online-players-destroyed-1-142-260-784-813-930-isk-worth-of-ships-in-2025-which-according-to-my-caveman-level-maths-amounts-to-over-usd6-million-lost-to-the-void/
