I'm intrigued by the amounts of RL money they equate with these figures. Could you actually sell that stuff, to other players or w/e, for that much or is that just the amount of donations it would require to get that much?
Eve's ingame currency, ISK, can be worked out in RL terms because of an item called PLEX which is traded on the ingame market (well, for the past few years, wasn't before). These PLEX are Pilots Licence Extensions, basically, an ingame item representing 30 days subscription time which can be redeemed ingame.
Plex are added to the game either by paying CCP (the devs) directly per PLEX or buying a Game Time Code (min is 60 days) from a reseller, which in turn, is redeemed for 2 PLEX. There's no other way to get them.
So, 1 PLEX is 30 days game time and 30 days game time is ~$15 USD, ergo 1 Plex = ~15 USD.
How does that equate ISK to RL money? Read on.PLEX are interesting because they're in game items. As such, like 99% of things in EvE, can be blown up if you take them outside of a station, or even stolen if you put them in corp/alliance hangers (not that you would ever do that).
They're also freely traded on the in game open market, so they have an in game value set by
player controlled supply and demand. Currently 1 PLEX is worth about 380 Million ISK. Which is actually a substantial amount of money, for a reference point: the majority of ships in-game range from 10,000 isk right up to 120million isk (some go past this, but out of 300ish ships there's only ~25 that cost over 1 billion ISK that are freely traded, ie not collectors pieces).
To add some more light into those figures, one billion ISK in game works out at about 70 USD.
Saying that, while 1 billion while quite a lot for a large portion of individual players, it's pocket change for corporations (in-game guilds) and especially Alliances (groups of corps flying under 1 banner). Another point of reference is the fact the player controlled ingame market trades
trillions of ISK per day. If you equate it to RL money, it's actually quite a substantial amount.
Obviously though, you can't sell anything in game for RL money. CCP will ban your arse for it as they maintain ownership. But the PLEX system does allow you to quantify it quite easily.
