For the past few weeks CCP Diagoras has been tweeting a steady stream of EVE Online statistics which has been quite fascinating to dig in to. By far the most interesting has been the economic statistics. EVE is a sandbox game where players have tremendous freedom to establish their own goals and playstyle but everyone needs money, so the flow of ISK through the game economy is incredibly important.
EVE is not a closed economy; while ISK does change hands between players frequently, it is also constantly being destroyed and created via various mechanics. The mechanics where ISK is created are called “ISK Faucets” as they are dumping ISK into the system. The mechanics where ISK is being destroyed are called “ISK Sinks” since they are draining ISK out of the system. I’ve always been curious what the actual numbers are and CCP Diagoras has finally made them available via his twitter feed. Here’s a rough breakdown I’ve compiled using a mix of data for February on the whole and some additional numbers for February 26. It’s not a perfect snapshot but the numbers should be roughly accurate.
February Daily Average
ISK Faucets:
– Bounty Awards: 1,106,321,000,000 (1.106 Trillion ISK)
– Sleeper Loot: 359,655,000,000 (359 Billion ISK)
– Incursion Payouts: 295,479,000,000 (295 Billion ISK)
– Mission Awards/Bonuses: 166,111,000,000 (166 Billion ISK)
– Insurance Awards to Players: 116,084,000,000 (116 Billion ISK)
Total sum of all daily ISK faucets: 1,962,000,000,000 or approx. 1.962 Trillion ISK.
Nearly 2 Trillion ISK are being created every single day, with bounties from blowing up NPCs over half the total. That does make sense since this is the major income source for the vast majority of players, from high-sec mission runners to low-sec ratters. Incursions, missions, and wormhole rat loot throw in another 700 Billion and the insurance system, which is slanted to provide ISK to players to lessen the impact of losing ships, provides the final approx 100 billion. This huge ISK flow is balanced by a wide variety of ISK sinks, but do they match up? Let’s take a look. In all cases this is money paid directly to NPCs, not money exchanged between players.
ISK Sinks:
– Skillbook Purchases: 237,931,000,000 (237 Billion ISK)
– Loyalty Store ISK Payments: 218,330,000,000 (218 Billion ISK)
– BPO Purchases: 162,068,000,000 (162 Billion ISK)
– Market Broker Fees: 89,900,000,000 (90 Billion ISK)
– Market Transaction Taxes: 81,900,000,000 (82 Billion ISK)
– Insurance Purchases: 67,500,000,000 (67 Billion ISK)
– Clone Upgrades/Replacements: 31,400,000,000 (31 Billion ISK)
– Alliance Sovereignty Upkeep: 27,900,000,000 (28 Billion ISK)
– Planetary Export/Import Fees: 25,580,000,000 (25.5 Billion ISK)
– Planetary Construction: 21,650,000,000 (21.6 Billion ISK)
– Office Rental Fees: 16,850,000,000 (16.8 Billion ISK)
– Contract Broker Fees: 10,400,000,000 (10.4 Billion ISK)
– NPC Repair Services: 10,100,000,000 (10.1 Billion ISK)
– War Declaration Fees: 5,150,000,000 (5.15 Billion ISK)
– Remainder: 7,251,000,000 (7.25 Billion ISK)
Remainder includes things like corporation recruitment advertising, manufacturing fees, contraband fines, releasing impounded corp assets, etc.
Altogether the multitude of ISK Sinks are taking just slightly over 1 Trillion ISK out of the system every day. It’s also interesting to note that some of the highly advertised ISK sinks like sovereignty upkeep and PI import/export fees have overall a rather slight effect in comparison with less noticeable ones like the loyalty point store and blueprint/skillbook purchases.
So where does that leave us? With an astounding surplus of around a TRILLION new ISK every single day!!!
Pretty remarkable. I would have always guessed it would be a surplus; after all, EVE may be a harsh game at times but players are always going to engage in activities that bring them a net profit in ISK. And it’s long been known that systems like insurance produce a net gain of ISK for players, though it’s interesting to see just how bad that ratio is… the SEC pays out nearly twice what they take in. Not many insurance companies could stay in business long like that in the real world!
So what is the impact of all this new ISK? Is there a tremendous amount of inflation in the game? According to CCP’s economic statistics inflation in EVE Online has been very mild, even when measured over long periods of time. So where is all the ISK going then? I suspect the truth is that there are two more ISK sinks that I think help keep the system in balance. One is simple greed. There are a small percentage of players who engage in huge and complex trading operations that net them enormous amounts of ISK. Essentially much of the ISK that enters the market is gradually funneled towards these players who can amass hundreds of billions or even trillions of ISK on one character. Much of this ISK is not in movement in the market. There is also another ISK sink… every time a player quits the game, their ISK is essentially removed from the game. It’s still there and could still come back in should they re-subscribe, but otherwise it’s gone for good. Or if a player’s account is banned for botting or somesuch that also removes that player’s ISK.
I suspect that the combination of these two factors accounts for much of that incredible 1 trillion ISK daily surplus. Of course, players are steadily getting richer in general; Titans used to exist in single digits and now there are many hundreds of them. Tech 3 cruisers were incredibly rare long after they were released but now entire fleets of them are being deployed.
Moral of the story: never underestimate the power of hundreds of thousands of intelligent geeks all wasting huge portions of their lives on one particularly well-designed and open-ended game.
ISK Faucets would also include Moon materials, ore and ice mining, PI, and datacore generation. ISK Sinks would include sovereignty costs, ship and module losses not covered by insurance, and I would assume, players who leave the game and don’t return.
Yeah sorry about that I posted early on accident.
Actually, all of the things you mention as ISK faucets are in fact ISK sinks… moon materials, minerals, ice, salvage, datacores, etc. are all created for free by players and destroyed by players, but any transactions involving them are taxed by the NPCs. So the only impact they have on the ISK flow is to remove a small percentage of the ISK used to buy/sell them on the market.
I had missed half your post, and I do understand what you are getting at. I question however how meaningful those figures are. Reporting on how much money is printed by CONCORD and its Empires is only part of the equation. You actually need to look at what wealth arbitarily flows into the game, and what flows out. That means to include moon materials, ore, rat loot drops, datacores etc. But the sinks include anything thing which burns up / is lost / destroyed – including PVE/PVP losses not covered by insurance, burnt POS fuels, fuel used in Capital Jumps, expelled ammo, maybe manufacturing losses through non-perfect BPO’s, items removed from space during the clean ups, items / ISK deleted due to association with RMT, items lost on deleted characters, plus everything you have mentioned above. Factor in the number of players, if they are active or not, and so on, and then you will get a better idea of how balanced the EVE economy is.
[…] don’t think the actual impact of this is going to be particularly large though. As my previous post on ISK faucets and sinks made clear, transaction taxes only take about 80-90 billion ISK out of the system per day. It […]