I'm pretty sure there is more than one player. Does that help?

Derp, dunno what I was thinking there. My estimate on EVE was off by a factor of 10.

There are 45k people on EVE right now, with Steam showing 871. That would give an estimate of 102k in STO right now, and I'm not for one second believing that, so I'm gonna say a lot higher percentage of STO players are in Steam than are EVE players.

Which is consistent with the fact STO is free in the Steam store, and EVE costs money, and most people playing EVE already had it before it came to Steam; so an STO player is more likely to download it and play an existing account than an EVE player is.

Or I could be completely wrong and there could be 102,000 people online in STO right now. I have trouble believing it, though. There aren't enough accounts in total to support those kinds of concurrency numbers in non-peak times.

I'm not sure why so many on these forums are in the "sky is falling" mode. I've played dying MMOs - one of which easily has under 1k players total and has been running on that margin, profitably, for several years. STO its not a dead or dying MMO in my opinion. Zone channels almost everywhere are as active, if not more active, since I started playing a couple years back,

This game still has a huge active staff, another indicator of a successful, and hence active MMO. The MMO I previously mentioned has a staff of12 or so with a few occasional freelancers, for the last several years.

The sky is not falling on STO...at least not yet. A conservative estimate, based only on experience with MMOs, and completely subjective, including off-again-on-again players, with summer as the peak, is about 30-50k players actually active, with well over 100k if you count those who have STO installed but only play once in a blue moon.

Yeah, the sky wasn't falling in CoH either until it did fall. I'm just putting that out there, not saying it's happening here.

Cool so STO has 5 years to go then.

What ever number ya get...

+1 for me.

Let's hope so.

5 years from now, the KDF will still be incomplete.

Romulan Playable Species will still be waiting for a D'Deridex lockbox ship.

They'll have made one new featured episode.

And the cloaking bug will still exist.

That's why people think the sky is falling.

So nothing new both in game and on the forums...yay.

Unless you're in Russia the Sky is falling.

NCSoft's decision to sunset CoX had MANY more factors behind it then just player population. One major one was 'Paragon Studios' was their only directly funded by NCSoft; full development studio NOT in Asia (meaning operating costs were higher); and Paragon was working on an NCSoft MMO that only existed in the Western MMO market (the did have a CoH Korean port, but that shutdown due to lack of players in Asia less then twon years after it released.) In the end, NCSoft wanted to refocus on their Asian market; and just do ports and text localization to other markets -- and they felt Paragon and CoX didn't have a good enough ROI. NCSoft also owns the CoX IP lock stock and barrel (Cryptic sold it to them, along with the rights to use/modify the version of their game engine it used in perpetuity)

Now, COULD PWI make a similar decision to refocus its efforts into its home markets one day? Sure. that would probably mean the dissolution of PWE (their Western Market arm); and divestiture of its holding (Cryptic, Runic Games <-- they do Torchlight and Torchlight II); but, given PWI stated they wanted to EXPAND their brand into the Western market -- and both STO (and CBS seems happy with the games performance as they continue to do articles, and STO fiction in their Star Trek magazine; and STO related guest blogs on sytartrek.com), and the Torchlight game are doing really well -- that they're ramping up to release 'NeverWinter; and even the CO community manager say Champions Online claims that game is still profitable for them -- it doesn't appear PWI is considering such a policy shift.

Could the situation change? Sure, but I don't think STO is in danger of sunsetting (or seeing CBS pull the ST MMO IP rights from Cryptic) anytime soon.