At this year's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, EVE Online CCP Hilmar Petursson gave a session all about the future of his space-age MMO. According to an article in GamesDigest, EVE's growth has been slow, but steady -- currently at 200,000 players, it aims to reach 300,000 in the next couple of years. Those are not ambitious numbers in terms of userbase size or rate of growth -- consider worlds like BarbieGirls or Nicktropolis that garnered millions in months, and EVE's been running for four years now.

But Petursson's vision for EVE is a world of content heavily dependent on a strong community -- Petursson wants to keep everyone in the same play world, or "shard," as opposed to most other MMOs that separates users into different areas, or onto separate servers, not necessarily allowing them to regularly share the same experience. It makes sense that slower and more gradual development would be key to achieving this strategy, especially as hardware standards advance and EVE players can anticipate a new DirectX graphical update this year.

Still, Petursson continues dreaming big, with the hopes of EVE “being the first game with more players than the population of the developer’s home country." This might be somewhat of a challenge, as EVE enjoys a particularly "hardcore" gamer audience. According to GamesDigest, 95% of EVE in-worlders are men, and very few of them are in the "sweet spot" under-18 audience that helps 'tween-targeted worlds flourish so quickly.

How to attract a broader userbase, then? Well, for one thing, avatars in EVE aren't people; they're space ships. Given the popularity of avatar personalization, clothing and other human-like peripherals particularly among the young female audiences that flock in droves to worlds based on fashion dolls, pets or home design, it's a little bit easier to see why EVE's demographic is still a little more limited than Petursson would like.

With that in mind, Petursson unveiled a new development at the EIF, giving an early look at character avatars to be introduced next year. Petursson hopes that allowing EVE users to personify people instead of merely hardware will attract a wider audience and create a deeper experience, adding a human element to the economics-heavy world (EVE even hired its own economist to work with the extensive in-world transaction system).

With the ever-present specter of the MMO's traditionally short lifecycle starting to breathe down EVE's neck after four active years, it looks like Petursson is focusing on keeping the upward climb going! Complete coverage of Peterssun's comments at EIF can be found at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

[Via GamesDigest]