CCP working towards 30 year lifespan for EVE Online

CCP Games are hoping that the world of EVE Online will still be thriving in 20 years time and are fully committed towards achieving this goal.

Speaking with Massively on the E3 show-floor, producer Jon Lander voiced the studio's long-term intentions. "We believe in making virtual worlds, and they don't have a shelf life. We want this game to be around in 10, 20, 30 years," he stated.

It is a goal that CCP has every intention of reaching. According to creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson there are "three or four times as many people working on EVE today compared to launch". "The development team has grown along with the revenue. We've never scaled down or switched over to a live team or a skeleton team," he continued.

Much of the game's success is attributed to this lack of change at the core of the game's development post-launch. "EVE's content is its people. When there's more people, there's more content going on, and if it becomes too saturated [in terms of hardware], we'll throw in another server. But it's still the same universe," Olafsson explained.

The success of this mindset can be seen in the numbers, with the population of New Eden at a near all-time high following the release of the Inferno expansion. "We are on the cusp of breaking our all-time subscriber record right now," Olafsson stated.

With EVE Online recently celebrating its nine year anniversary, the ten year goal seems well within reach, although CCP's long-term intentions are not limited just to EVE. New Eden is set to expand with the launch of DUST 514 later this year for PlayStation 3, which will be linked to EVE's universe."We want a DUST 10-year anniversary, and this universe is contantly growing," Lander claimed.