ISK vs. ISK

I suggested in a science fiction piece I published here recently that the GDP of Eve Online was going to surpass Iceland's by 2012. The unique financial position Iceland finds itself in at the moment has encouraged me to look into this in a little more detail.

The last figures I can find for the GDP equivalent for Eve Online are the Gross User Product for June 2007, which was 50 Trillion ISK, with a projected growth of 5% to 25% per month. At a lower bound of 5% growth per month, this gives us an estimated GUP for October 2008 of 110 Trillion ISK. It is considerably harder to find a good guide to the Eve Online ISK to USD exchange rate: an Ebay answers article suggests an exchange rate of about 11 million to the USD.

The main ambiguity in the EVE GUP figures is the definition of the term trillion. I'm going to assume that Eve is reporting on a short scale trillion (10 to the power of 12), which implies Eve Online has a GDP of approximately USD $10 million.

The real world Iceland had a GDP of USD $19,510 million in 2007. That suggests that Eve Online is currently equivalent to a handy 0.5% of Iceland's 2007 GDP figures, and growing at a rate that will surpass Iceland's GDP by 2019 (It may have already surpassed Iceland's population).

I was surprised to find that, despite having it's own economist, that there is not more current figures available. So is it possible to find other figures that confirm that 5% growth per month estimate?

It turns out there is. This article provides an estimated GDP per capita of 100 million ISK as of June 2006 and this press release indicates CCP are confident of hitting 250,000 subscribers by Q2 2008. While from different time periods, we can do a back of the envelope calculation - noting that the per capita GDP growth has only been going upwards in the earlier chart - and estimate the Eve Online GDP as of March 2008 as of 25 Trillion ISK. That of course grossly underestimates the figure given in June 2007 - suggesting that the per capita ISK figure has grown by at least double in 12 months (more because there are were less in game players at this time). A more recent press release puts the figure in November 2007 as 450 million ISK per person - a fourfold growth, or at least 100 Trillion ISK GDP in November 2007.

What this suggests is the 110 Trillion ISK figure I gave earlier is an underestimate, and a higher total should be used. Note that every time we use a higher figure, Eve Online's GDP increases proportionate to Iceland and the rate of growth increases reducing the number of years required to reach Iceland's 2007 GDP figures reduces. And with the economic problems Iceland currently has, it is unlikely to expand the 2007 GDP figure for a while. In fact, I'd suggest as a sound bite, Eve Online has undoubtedly exceeded 1% of Iceland's GDP. The fact you haven't heard about it, is because the larger Eve Online gets, the more exposed it is as a non-national entity to manipulation by outsiders.

The fly in the oinment of course, is the estimate of Eve Online ISK per US dollar. I don't have solid figures for this, and the currency itself is not freely tradeable. But then again, neither is the Icelandic ISK. Luckily the figure I used is a black market price, which is far likelier to represent the true conversion rate than a fixed official exchange rate.

So what is a truer figure? Sans better Google searching, or some official figures, I'm going to wildly speculate for a second. Let's assume a subscriber base of 300,000 at this point in time, and a per capita figure which doubles every six months. Extropolating from the 100 trillion November 2007 estimate gives us an estimate of 480 million ISK November this year, or USD $43 million: 2% of Iceland's GDP, quadrupling per annum. That means without a population cap, Eve Online will exceed Iceland's 2007 GDP in approximately three years. I may have underestimated a little in my science fiction think piece.

The other argument of course, is that Eve Online doesn't produce any commodities and therefore a GDP figure is meaningless. If you've read Prince Charming you'll know my counter argument: Eve Online produces CPU time. And that should be enough to change the world.

Prince Charming: A Postscript

This is, of course, a huge Eve Online fan story - not in the sense that it features anything from the Eve universe, but in the infectious sense of fun that Hilmar Peterssun conveyed at the Edinburgh Interactive festival that I attended last year, and the scale and sense of the challenges that running a single shard poses for the game.

The story itself is flawed, as several of the magazine editors I submitted it to pointed out, in that 'what the female character does is sit there and listen to the male character explaining how great he is', but at the same time I immensely enjoyed the process of writing and submitting it for consideration, and the feedback I received. It crystallized as a piece of fiction beamed whole into my brain on the final night of my honeymoon and is dedicated to my wife as the first story written about and for her.

As for why I am publishing it here, instead of continuing the submission rounds, you can blame Warren Ellis. His recent diatribe on why the print science fiction market is failing forced me to consider if I'd ever get the story published, and that it is better in the creative commons, where gamers and science fiction fans alike can enjoy it. As for why I'm doing it for free, it's because I can't get a Pay Pal account up and running at the moment. When I do, feel free to tip as little or as much as you think the story is worth.

You can also blame Charles Stross. If I get another rejection letter pointing out how Strossian this story is, I'll point out that few other authors have been privileged enough to end up as an adjective, and as a relative newcomer on the scene, he should thank the accident of fate that ensures his name is so easily abused. Luckily, this story opens with a scene that passes the Bechdel test, even with its subsequent flaws, so I'm sure he would approve.

Eve Online

[Edit: For Eve fans out there, you might also want to have a look at the live blog notes I made on another panel that Hilmar Peterssun was on. I also can type up the notes on the Q & A that immediately followed this session if you want, including how Scottish rodents took down Eve Online. And I can provide some general impressions of Hilmar if requested. Just post below if you are interested.]

Peterssunn: I am going to explain the concept of Eve Online and CCP. CCP is an Icelandic company from 10 years ago, its taken a while for us to get to this point. We founded the company in a space that didn't really exist at the point in time. Worked on a property called Lazytown to fund the start of the company.

We began full-force in 2000, by raising $3 million which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG. 3 years of development, the last year of which we had no money but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them. This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community especially.

We had publishing problems, with Simon & Schuster, which resulted in no distribution or marketing, despite having 30,000 players. We ended up buying the rights back at 2002 and going into digital distribution. This has forced us to treat this more as a service as a product and using viral marketing techniques to propagate the product out, long before others were doing this.

We are planning a massive graphical upgrade to the game, and should hit 200,000 subscriptions later this year. We have had different growth than most other games, because the whole game takes place on a single shard, which allows escalation of power and social equity as the size of the community grows.

(Plays Revelations II trailer. Audio mix isn't great and voice over not really legible.
Good to see the Titans with lots of tiny ships around them).

The important thing to note that the graphics were straight from the game. From 2003 I had to have arguments on the phone as publishers would not believe graphics from the game.

Started off as an MMORPG but it is now become more of a virtual society. [He contrasts Themepark (WoW) vs Playground (Eve / Ultima) approach] Ultimately, its about the kids who are playing in the sand box. CCP just has to make sure the sand is clean.

When you give people the tools, which can be small and not particularly complex, complex behaviour emerges. What surprised us, was how fast the players came up to speed on what the potential of the tools in the sandbox are. 121.573 man years has been put into Eve by the players. When people play, they are doing something social and its inheriently competively social and that allows you to hone and develop skills which are applicable to real life: incentive plans for employees, using PR to take down your enemy, manage complex logistics.

[Shows the Tranquility Map] The hope was that people would start off in high-security space and then move to low security space. What we saw was that people did this in accordance to their nationality. The Russians hacked the game so that they could write in Cyrillic. This lead to the fact that their only method of communication was violence. Their next door neighbors, the Scandinavians became the recipients of this. The Russians were very well organised and had better pilots, but they couldn't defeat the Scandanavians. But as it turned out that the Scandanavians were being fronted by the Americans, who were claiming not to be involved. And until the Russians figured this out and persuaded the French to attack the Americans were they able to defeat the Scandanavians. This ran from month 3 to month 6 of the game and involved about 20,000 people. There was a lot of PR in this: e.g. the American's claiming their innocence and so on.

[Talks about fansites] Very early on a radio station was created: Eve radio. They have now built a TV station to complement this. Eon magazine is the People magazine of the Eve world. Eve TV has a CNN style news report of the Eve world. There is a huge group of people who make trailers and movies in the world [Shows Day of Darkness video by an amateur community in the game]. All the property destroyed in the game was destroyed for real.

(Aside: I was expecting a movie, but its more like a dance track. I guess its from the lack of frame of reference not having played the game).

[Slide: It took 250,000 man years to build the Great Pyramid. We are half-way there.]

The important thing to note the social equity investment in the game. Even though they are not directly creating the world (as in Eve), the social structures they have created in the game are real.

Scalability is the hugest issue. It has continously exceeded our ability to build the servers to support the infrastructure. There's about 2 tonnes of equipment and we are investigating high-performance computing concepts to scale the load. You are at the forefront of the impossible of computer science. Last year we introduced the concept of solid state disks to support the database.

We have 200,000 people who buy and sell resources on an open market, so we have to use natural resource dynamics to ensure that the economy that does not inflate or deflate. We hired an economist earlier in the year.

We have strived to build the way people relate within an organisation within the game [Goes into linear relationship between brain size and maximum number of people known]. Its like running IBM with 20,000 employees. Traditionally, MMO developers have been despotic. We are now in a big effort to decentralise governance of the world. We want to employ democratic elections to elect representatives to have an ongoing say in development.

[Shows examples of improvement in graphics]