EVE Online Concurrent User Progress

Last Sunday EVE Online came closer to reaching the astonishing mark of 25,000 players logged in at the same time. One universe, no sharding nor instancing. Now this is not impressive I hear you say because other MMORPGs have much more players logged-in at the same time. But are they in the same gaming universe, or realm? The answer to that is a resounding no. And that's because other MMOs in order to balance server load, split users amongst various servers, or realms as they are often called.
This creates a multitude of worlds where can only interact with the other players on that same server. World of Warcraft has over 100 of theses realms if I'm correct. EVE has always maintained the approach that an MMORPG offers a better experience if players can all interact together.

Anyways, enough boasting! This milestone got me thinking about EVE's PCU (Peak Concurrent Users) records of the last few years since it came live. So I did a bit of research and using mainly MMORPG.com, EVE Online's news and a bit of googling I gathered as much data on the past PCU records. The above chart represents the progress of the PCU over the last 2 years. Notice though that there is a gap between September 2004 and August 2005, as I was not able to get any data on those months - that's almost a year missing. Still, this gives us a good indication of EVE's progress. If this trend continues, we should hit that 25k mark sometime in late March, early April. Let's see if we can do it sooner!

Congratulation to CCP for a job well done. These results prove it without a doubt.