EVE on Steam: Past, Present and Future

Greetings,

My name is CCP Spitfire; some of you might remember me from the forum days of old. I used to be a Russian community coordinator for EVE Online, and now I am a part of the CCP sales team. We work on setting up partnerships with game retailers and distributors to bring EVE Online to the masses, and also manage CCP’s ETC reseller and affiliate programs.

Today I would like to tell you about our new initiative that has been in the works for some time. We have just completed integration with the Steam gaming platform, and now people who buy EVE Online via this channel will have a slightly different user experience compared to the past.

First of all, tomorrow you might notice a new Steam icon on the EVE web login page. This means that you no longer need to manually create an EVE Online account after buying the game activation key on Steam; instead you use your Steam credentials to log into the game and the websites. This has been made possible by the Single Sign-On (SSO) technology developed by Team GForce.

Furthermore, players who have bought EVE Online on Steam from May 31 will be able to pay for their subscription on a recurring basis and buy PLEX packages directly via Steam, thanks to the back-end work done by Team Mammon.

Why are you doing this?

We first started offering EVE Online on Steam in March 2008. Since then tens of thousands of players entered the EVE universe though this medium, and we want to take this cooperation even further: after all, Steam is the world’s largest gaming platform. We also took an opportunity to clean up the product description for EVE Online, update the artwork, fix the client deployment process and introduce the new Starter Pack for new players instead of a generic game activation key.

I already bought EVE on Steam, why can’t I use the new features?

Initially the new features will be rolled out to new users only. Once we evaluate the feedback and data from the first stage of the program, we will look at taking the next steps and adding new features to the integration. EVE Online subscription and PLEX packages on Steam are priced in the exact same way as on our own website, so all players are on equal footing regardless of the way they pay for their subscriptions.

What’s next?

We will evaluate the performance of the new options over the coming months and see what makes sense to do next: as mentioned above, one opportunity would be to open new subscription options and PLEX purchases to existing EVE Online users on Steam. We would love to hear your opinions on this; please leave your questions and feedback in the comments thread.

Other aspects of Steam we are potentially very interested in are the Community Hub and Steam Workshop – our community team has already started looking into the possibilities here, and we would love to hear your feedback on this as well.

Cheers!