The Economy of EVE Online (Part 3): Mega Projects

This is a Titan.

It is the biggest, baddest capital ship in the game that a player can fly.

It was designed as a flagship for alliance fleets as a military asset so powerful that it could turn the tide of a thousand-player battle and dictate the outcome of wars.

This ship is the culmination of hundreds of man-hours and an unimaginable amount of virtual resources, a production schedule of nearly a year and a half.

This ship has actually become pretty damn common.

When Titans were first introduced to the game by CCP, the game developers, there was believed to only ever be a handful produced.

Today, the economic powerhouses of coalitions like the Imperium, that we have studied in a previous video, churn them out at a rate of hundreds a year.

There are now thousands of these ships in a game, and seeing them really is not that special anymore.

So what kind of impact does building these warships have on the economies of New Eden? Now, right off the bat, I must address that most Titans in EVE are self-funded by the players that will actually fly them, rather than being built by established government military industrial complexes.

But putting that aside, we can still assess what their real-life military equivalent is.

Titans were introduced to EVE Online in December of 2005, and the first Titan to ever be produced was not completed until nearly a year later.

At the time, the cost of a Titan was about 150 billion ISK, which is the in-game currency.

To put that in perspective, it was about 5% of the GDP of Ascendant Frontier, the player alliance responsible for launching the first Titan, named Steve, in honor of the late Steve Irwin, who passed away around this time.

Figures from back in this day were much harder to get hard data on, and a big thank you to the team at CCP who have been assisting me with finding this more obscure information.

But from what we can determine, this was an undertaking the equivalent of the United States today building 74 Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers at a price of 13 billion US dollars each.

That's right, this one Titan was as big of an investment as 74 of the most powerful modern warships in the world.

Today, the industrial giants of EVE Online, such as the economic powerhouse of the Imperium, the game's largest player nation, churn out these virtual behemoths on a truly industrial scale.

Not only are these player-run factories able to produce far more of these once legendary spaceships, they are doing it far more efficiently, cutting the cost down to only about 50 billion ISK per ship.

Now, when considering the inflation that we have talked about in a video too of this series, this makes a Titan in 2019 1/20 the real price of an original Titan in 2006.

A quick side note is that when someone says real in the context of economics, it just means accounting for inflation.

So when you hear someone say real wage growth in the media, remember that it means an increase in wages after inflation is considered.

Now, with that out of the way, the mega factories of EVE Online super coalitions are truly reminiscent of the United States at the peak of World War II, building military equipment on a truly uncontestable scale.

Today, given the falling real prices of Titans and the massive economic growth of these player nations, a Titan only represents about 0.0043% of the Imperium's GDP, which we worked out in the first video series to be about 1.15 quadrillion ISK, meaning that a Titan today represents the equivalent of the US military spending just under $900 million.

A large amount, but nowhere near the investment of what they represented 10 years ago.

This evolution in productive capacity is truly a mirror of the ever-growing world we live in today.