EVE Online turned six years old on Wednesday, a long life for a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Publisher CCP Games also announced that more than 300,000 subscribers now guide their characters through EVE's persistent futuristic universe, where all players participate on a single server, as opposed to other MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, that host multiple copies of the same game world.

The news comes on the heels of the release of EVE Online's latest free expansion pack, Apocrypha, in March. CCP says three times this year it has also passed another milestone: the largest number of concurrent users, which is now 53,850.

CCP says that it defines subscribers thus: "Individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active electronic time code (ETC) to play EVE Online, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions and expired ETCs."