The Economy of EVE Online

From the EVE economy, from trade balances of regions to the consumer price index of in-game items.

And yes, we are still talking about a video game here.

Something really cool that this allows us to do with a bit of engineering is to work out the GDP of one of these in-game player nations, both in terms of in-game currency and the real-life dollar equivalent.

A quick reminder is that GDP is normally used to work out the size of real-life nations' economies, and it is calculated using this formula: GDP equals household spending plus government spending plus investment plus net exports.

The Imperium draws its borders around this area of the map, centralizing on an in-game region called Delve.

The borders do overflow into surrounding regions like Querious, but a vast majority of the Imperium's trade and industry takes place here.

Delve is also where their capital city is located.

So for the sake of simplicity, we will just look at Delve.

If we look at the monthly economic report for January 2019, we can work out everything we need to know to get a GDP figure.

Starting with household spending, the total market trade in Delve in this period was 48.6 trillion ISK, ISK being the in-game currency.

To add onto this, there were contracts traded in this region for an additional 32 trillion ISK.

Contracts in this game are normally used to trade higher value one-off items.

But for all intents and purposes, it's the same as trading on an open market.

This gives us a combined household spending figure of 90.6 trillion ISK for this region for this period.

Next up is government spending.

In this case, the alliances of the Imperium are the government.

Now, this actually cannot be determined by the monthly economic report because unfortunately, it keeps those figures private.

But remember when I was talking about their welfare systems that ensure that everybody has a ship to fly? Well, using this, we can reverse engineer a rough guesstimate of how much the Imperium spends on this service.

Every ship destroyed in EVE Online is listed on this third-party website that has some amazing tools available to filter through who it belonged to and how it was destroyed.

By looking at this period, we can determine that about 2 trillion ISKs worth of Imperium ships were destroyed, and that would be eligible for a ship replacement welfare program.

This is admittedly the roughest figure in this calculation because the Imperium does spend a little bit more money on in-game items despite this welfare, and not all ships destroyed are necessarily eligible for this welfare.

But I am happy to agree on a rough 2 trillion ISK figure for this period.

Next up, investment.

Now, in EVE, this figure is roughly a function of normal consumption.

The one thing EVE Online does not have is a functioning financial securities market.