People despise losing progress, so why is loss key to Eve Online

Eve Online is approaching its 17th anniversary, and this has developer CCP Games examining the game’s longevity. Some of the company’s findings seem obvious. The massively multiplayer online space-exploration game enables people to socialize, and it deeply rewards the acquisition of skills and knowledge. But CCP has also found something surprising: Eve Online forges its fandom through loss. And that is antithetical to the way most other games work.

Human beings hate loss. Think about anytime that a software crash has caused you to lose a day’s worth of writing, coding, or data entry. That rage you feel when you lose work you’ve already done is blinding. And it’s something that designers sometimes wield against players. In a free-to-play mobile game like Puzzle & Dragons, players gain all kinds of exciting loot through a dungeon. But then the dungeon ends with a tough boss, and players will lose everything they’ve earned if they don’t beat that enemy. But, of course, if you do lose, all hope isn’t lost — you can pay $1 to keep everything. And humans have such a deep aversion to loss that many will pay to evade those emotions.