Is Entropia Universe worth playing? Active or Dead in 2026?

Entropia Universe — the famous Casino MMORPG!

We've talked about it for 12 parts. Is it really worth your time in the end?

Is Entropia Universe Worth Playing? My Honest Verdict After 2,300 Hours

For Your Information: this article was last updated on July 15, 2026, Revised and Corrected by Claude.

My short answer? No. But I'm not going to leave you with a lazy "of course not" — you deserve the reasoning, and by now you've earned it after 12 parts... By the way if you directly arrived on this verdict, i encourage you to read the rest later.

But first, read this — it matters more than everything below.

What follows is going to look like a full-on demolition of Entropia Universe. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's the frustration of someone who loved this game and watched what it could have become. I've spent 2,300+ hours in this universe. I came back three times across two decades. Nobody wastes that much life on something they hate. Every criticism you're about to read is really a sentence that starts with "it could have been SO much better if only...". This is not a hate letter. It's a break-up letter — the kind you only write to something you cared about.

So if MindArk ever reads this: none of it is personal. It's a list of everything that could have made Entropia the greatest MMORPG concept of its generation — and everything that got traded away for short-term revenue.

Now, let's get to the reasons. 😏

First: Don't Believe You Can Make Money Out of This Game

1. Many players (including me back in late 2006) believed this promise...
2. We all thought we'd be smarter than the players who failed before us
3. Entropia Universe is a CASINO — whatever happens, the house always wins
4. LUCK is as rare a factor here as in any real-life casino

Even players who invested $20,000+ in virtual lands — meaning they own them and earn a % on all activity there — end up leaving the game (David Joker Potanus the last perfect example). There are players who invested in space services, buying a big ship or even an entire fleet, and who eventually left Entropia looking for buyers...

And of course, they tell the new buyers it's a fantastic opportunity. Nobody's going to admit they got tired of earning a tiny salary for 10+ hours a day in-game 😅 So real lifes are ruined one after the other... it's like i have a disease, who wants it ?

Don't believe everything you see... A HOF or Global usually only means "loss refund", not profit!

The devil is in the details, and here's the detail: you're not going to win much in Entropia Universe. Because honestly — who in their right mind would walk away from a GOOD salary in EU to do something else?

The ugly truth is that these players weren't earning much from their lands, their space services or their avatar. And they eventually went back to a real job in real life. Because here's the secret: you can make money 100 times faster in real life than by playing Entropia Universe. That's why people should make money IRL and then spend it in the game.

I've seen plenty of farewell posts saying "it was a wonderful experience, thanks for everything"... That's the same energy as a LinkedIn goodbye post — everyone knows that when people move on, it's because the last chapter wasn't that good. It's an open secret, so in everyone's head it's not "congratulations", it's more like "finally! he moved on!"

Second: This Game Will Make You Think SMALL

Ever heard "think big to improve your life"? Entropia Universe teaches you the exact opposite.

• Because you stop thinking in real currency and start thinking in PED
• 10 PED = $1, but one day, in your head, 1 PED will feel like $1

Don't tell me it won't happen to you. It happens to everyone in Entropia Universe.

The result? Players arguing endlessly over a 1 PED sale — meaning buyer or seller is fighting hard over 10 cents. That's something you'd never do in real life. Unless you're living on Skidrow but in that case what are you doing on EU ?!?

A sweat gathering circle running all day long... and one little truth on the AD Terminal.

This game will train you to think like a beggar!

Sweat gatherers — the only free activity in-game — will spend hours in the trade channel trying to sell sweat at 1.5 PED/k, knowing full well nobody will buy at that price, and refusing 1.2 PED out of principle. We're talking about the difference between 15 cents and 12 cents. Personally, I'd never fight over cents in real life. Would you?

And I'd certainly never "work" for such a small amount — yet some sweat gatherers treat this as a serious occupation, when the same hours spent on a real-life job would earn them 100 times more.

I remember Root a former society leader of mine and most useless mentor ever on Entropia Universe, delighted to have earned 100 PED from a big in-game organization for promotional work. I did the maths in my head: that's $10... and he's genuinely happy. That moment told me everything about how this game rewires your sense of value.

Third: Real Profit Is Only a Dream

Some players will tell you they managed to profit. But again, the truth hides in the details:

• Someone might tell you they made 1,000 PED profit
  — that's $100. You could earn that in one night working a cloakroom at a nightclub.
• Someone might tell you they withdrew 150,000 PED ($15,000)... but how much did they deposit first?
  If you put in $20,000 and withdraw $15,000, you didn't profit — you lost money.
• And I'll skip over those celebrating a 50 PED profit... that's $5.

You will never see the REAL balance — the true wins-versus-losses — because almost nobody publishes it. The rare exceptions are players who invested heavily and claimed to profit, but their numbers are impossible to verify independently. And when I look at what happened to most other big investors, I have my doubts 😏

Because most players don't speak about them... Apart from Fargo, one of the players who invested a lot in the game in the past and who did manage to profit from it. Even if i have some doubts on the numbers he announced... guy claimed to be a millionaire... and when i see what happened to the other investors... it's just healthy to have doubts 😏

Again — these globals only ever recovered part of my losses.

A few players (fortunately just a few) decided to invest BIG to buy what we call "UBER gear" in order to guarantee profit — meaning deposits of $30,000 to $50,000, because that's what the best gear costs. And what happened? Some went radio silent, others started blogs to vent their frustration, and the rest simply left.

Because most of them were disappointed. Understand this: even a huge deposit and perfect consistency guarantees nothing. Consistency or not, it's a casino. It's gambling.

And don't put too much faith in the forum regulars who always defend MindArk.

Whatever your results, they'll serve you the same script:

• You're not cycling enough, you need more patience
• You don't have the right gear, you need to invest more
• Your looter levels are too low, raise them
• You're not consistent enough, play more
• You're selling to the terminal below 110% markup — every cent counts!

And the underlying message is always the same: you'd have to spend your entire life in EU to profit 😆

There are plenty of genuinely brilliant, maths-minded people playing this game. But it doesn't matter how good you are at maths: a casino is still a casino. You can't beat the machine, and no one can guarantee you a return percentage.

Frankly, there's a life outside — and at least a thousand video games more interesting than EU.

Fourth: The Trust Problem With MindArk

In my experience, MindArk has developed a reputation for:

• Poor communication — it often feels like talking to someone who'd rather not answer
• Slow or absent responses to players who invested real money
• Reluctance to rework existing features, even when players ask for years
• Promises that never materialize
• A customer support experience that ranks among the weakest I've encountered in the entertainment industry
• Quality assurance that feels improvised when new features or events ship

Knowing all this, I struggle to understand players who keep depositing heavily. My honest read is that many are simply too invested to walk away — they've put thousands into an avatar and can't face the idea of losing it, so they keep hoping for a better future. It's a very human reaction, and I don't judge them for it. But it isn't a strategy.

A crowd gathering for the newest carrot... and questionable value on the right.

MindArk's communication has always been opaque. Ask uncomfortable questions on the official forum and your thread may be removed under vaguely-worded rules. Push too hard and — at least in my own experience, which I documented in full here — you may find your account suddenly under "investigation" and locked.

Plenty of investors — land owners, planet partners, or simply players trying to build a business — created frustrated threads over the years before grabbing what money they had left and quitting for good.

And quality-of-life requests go nowhere...

Take one small, concrete example: players have asked for years for a simple slider to control pet sounds — a trivial development task. The thread was bumped so many times that an admin eventually promised it would be looked at before the end of 2023. Guess what happened? The thread was abandoned, and when someone bumped it one final time, it was locked with the explanation that the issue involved a Planet Partner pet and therefore couldn't be fixed 🤣 Which was laughable, because the request was to mute ALL pets — including MindArk's own Calypso pets.

That tiny slider is the whole company in miniature: a five-minute fix, requested for years, deflected with an excuse, then locked away. If they can't ship that, what exactly are we hoping for?

Edit 2026 : The pet slider has finally been introduced in the game after years of requests... And its implementation was quite fast! Why is that ? Because there was a thread on Steam platform, where MindArk hopes to acquire more players, saying these pet sounds was so annoying it could cause new players to leave right away... Someone from Senior Management at MindArk saw it, and strangely from one day to another the pet slider was implemented! no questions asked 😆

Now the deal with the support:

As for the support itself, I think the problem is structural rather than personal. When your team is instructed to stay vague and non-committal, you inevitably end up with the weakest support in the industry. They handle easy questions fine — but the moment your question is inconvenient, the silence begins.

So these same players then create a thread on the official forum saying they don't understand, their account is locked, the customer support is not answering them... Yeah well... That's why i have created this article! read it before playing to EU ☺️ Because the community can't do anything, and they won't do anything. Because remember what i said above about players who are asking too many questions, or who are shouting too loud on the forum for answers ?

They will be the next on the "flagged list"... so everyone stays quiet as it's not their problem. One player said one day on the forum "Is it North Korea here now or what ?!?", his post was removed very fast by the admin and strangely we never heard of him anymore... Understand that MindArk don't like dissidence in their ranks.

Finally when MindArk decides to implement new things... there is no Quality Service to check if everything is going to work as intended. Most of the time "Implementations of new features" by MindArk are "Experiments" ! It might work... And if it doesn't... well... it doesn't and you'll have to live with it. 😕 Not the kind of thing you want to see in a RCE...

Remember the movie Airplane ? Where you're wondering if there is someone piloting it or not ? The exact same question could be asked of MindArk... And if there is no one at the commands, we might even be reassured as it would explain a lot ! Anyway in the end... As the MindArk "Yes men" will repeat to you... "If you don't like it, just uninstall it" 😐

MindArk's server infrastructure struggles with most big events — lag ruins the experience.

Fifth: The Marketing Doesn't Match Reality

MindArk's social media has a habit of painting a picture that long-time players struggle to recognize.

The most uncomfortable example for me was during the war in Ukraine...

MindArk blocked Russian players from accessing the game — punishing an entire population for the actions of their government, which I've always found deeply wrong. But here's what struck me most: while publicly joining a noble cause, they never made withdrawals any faster for Ukrainian players.

Think about what that means. In wartime, the thing you need most is access to your money — to survive, to flee, to start over somewhere safe. Ukrainian players had real assets locked in EU, and to my knowledge nothing was done to help them retrieve those funds any quicker than the standard ~50 business days. I have my own painful experience with this: my own withdrawal took 176 business days after I helped a Ukrainian refugee.

And there's a darker thought I can't shake: some players in that war didn't survive. Their virtual assets simply remain with MindArk. I'm not aware of any process to contact families and tell them their loved one had funds that could be claimed. In a Real Cash Economy handling real people's money, that's a question worth asking out loud.

I'll be blunt about where I stand: I have lost all trust in this company — and I'll say it even if my account gets locked for it. I've been locked once already; I survived.

Mentorship gifts are underwhelming... so let's just fly and breathe a little.

Remember when the War started between Ukraine and Russia ? MindArk posted a picture on their social networks, depicting a photo of an Ukraine Army guy, with a laptop in front of him displaying Entropia Universe...

Problem was... It was 100% photoshopped ! Because it's well known that when you're in the trenches fearing for your life, you have time to play to Entropia Universe !! 🤔 Later MindArk removed this picture it seems, but the harm was done.

MindArk also ran a kind of competition, where people could win a Starter Pack by taking the best picture representing the Summer. So anyone who know how MindArk works, know that MindArk NEVER gives anything from their webshop for FREE 😏 The only FREE stuff you can get from MindArk are pills ingame to make you shoot faster and spend more money !

This Picture competition was Fake from the beginning to the end... The winner was a photoshopped picture, as it was impossible to get such a screenshot from the game... And on that case, one smart person asked how it was possible ?!?

The person who answered him had a whole new created social media account, just to answer him... And then redirected him to a whole newly created X (Twitter) page, where this person showed how he did to photoshop the original screenshot 😆 laughable really as it was a MindArk employee who did it all !

And of course when MindArk announced that the competition was over, they NEVER mentionned the names of the winners, because IT WAS A LIE from the beginning ! Just to attract new players thinking this game was rewarding its players...

Judge MindArk on what lands in your account, never on what appears in a marketing post.

You should have sent MindArk these generic screenshots for the promotional contest...

Sixth: Don't Look for Friends in a Casino

I'll never say it enough: don't come to Entropia Universe looking for friendship.

There's so much drama in this game 😐

— and for an obvious reason: money drives everyone's behaviour. Add to that the fact that EU is a casino MMORPG where nearly every activity can be done solo. It's exactly like walking into a casino where everyone sits at their own slot machine. Sure, you can join a society and say "hello friends" — but 99% of what you do, you'll do alone.

And because everything revolves around real money, you'll also meet more than your share of tall-tale tellers. Gamblers like to brag — that's human, we all do it a little. But in EU, some players invent entire lives for themselves. I remember one who claimed to earn $10,000 a day and own several businesses, while somehow spending all day in-game "to relax" 🤣

And plenty believed him, because he sounded reasonable... You know who else sounds reasonable? Con artists. Sounding credible is literally the job description. So take every "I'm rich and EU made me rich" story with a large pinch of salt. Because stories you'll find by the dozen, but proof you'll find none!

I've worked in real life managing IT support in international companies, alongside people earning serious money. Not one of them would have touched a game like Entropia Universe — it simply wasn't in their world. Make of that what you will.

You'd have a better time playing almost anything else out there: great stories, great gameplay, entertainment far above what EU delivers. And if your only reason for staying is "at least there's a chance to make money", when you could earn real money 100 times faster in real life... then you've already proven my second point: EU makes you think SMALL.

So, Active or Dead? The Real 2026 Numbers

Here's the question in my title, and it deserves an honest, data-backed answer rather than a rant.

And the answer surprised even me...Entropia Universe is not dead !

— but it isn't alive either. It survives 😄 Population trackers put the active base at around 1,100 to 1,150 players as of mid-2026, with a peak of roughly 1,396 in March 2026 and a low of 663 in August 2025. On Steam, concurrent players hover around 170, with an all-time peak of just 267 since the July 2025 launch.

Now here's the part I have to report honestly, even though it argues against my own thesis...

the daily player count has actually grown by roughly 94% year-on-year. The Steam launch worked — it brought in fresh blood. MindArk also shipped a brand-new starter zone (Setesh) and, in April 2026, an entire Fishing and Cooking profession system. So no, this isn't a ghost town in freefall. The needle moved up.

But context is everything...

Doubling from a very small number still leaves you with a very small number: ~1,100 players makes EU a niche within a niche, in an industry where a healthy MMO counts tens of thousands. Its Steam review score sits at a "Mixed" 63% — and the loudest current complaints from actual players? Bots ("Synths") hunting 24/7 with unlimited wallets, and a grind described as "unbalanced and unrewarding".

Basically... The problems I've spent 12 parts describing are still the problems in 2026... (did you read them ? ☺️)

There is a theory on the implementation of these "Synths", meaning Built-in AI Avatars...

ANd it's not completely far off to be honest... We spoke about the low population of EU, and thus MindArk never spoke about it. With this experiment to put AI avatars among Real avatars, you can artificially raise the population. If proven sucessful, this experiment can potentially make Synths blend completely with real humans, and in a close future... Who will be able to tell the difference between a Synth and a real human ?

They will learn more and more each passing day, mimicking real complex human behaviors at perfection, and they will use the same chat to discuss with real avatars. There won't be specific windows to tell the difference between the computer and a real person... from there MindArk can definitely and without notifying anyone, implement more and more synths in EU, double the population at some point, do some marketing to attract new players who will think "this game is not dead" 😏

Even though the reality will be 50% players, 50% AI...

As for the company behind it: MindArk reported revenue of about $7.98M for 2025, its stock trades near $0.07 for a market cap around $2.36M, and management repeatedly cited lower activity in Entropia Universe throughout 2025. In 2023 they cut up to 40% of their staff to pivot toward AI; by 2025 the CEO described rebuilding the organisation "from the ground up" around it. (And yes — the CEO change happened in 2024, and from a player's seat, nothing improved.)

So my verdict on Active or Dead ? 😎 is "i will survive" from Gloria Gaynor !

EU is a museum with the lights on. Enough players to trade with, enough events to fill a calendar, enough new features to make a press release — but never enough momentum to become the game it was meant to be. Twenty-five years in, EU is still a fascinating concept preserved in a small, self-consuming economy. It won't die. It just won't live either.

What Entropia Universe Could Have Been

Now let me tell you why I really wrote all of this — all 13 parts of it.

Because the concept is genuinely brilliant. A persistent sci-fi universe with a real economy, where your time has actual value, where a virtual sword or a plot of land is worth something outside the game, where players can build businesses and services and lives... Nobody else did this. Nobody else has done it since. Entropia Universe was 20 years ahead of every "play-to-earn" pitch that came later — and it did it without a single blockchain buzzword.

Yeah it's true there is also Second Life, but it's nowhere near what Entropia Universe has achieved!

Imagine the version of this game that could have existed. A universe-wide auction house connecting every planet's economy. Space patrols making trade routes feel alive instead of lawless. Withdrawals processed in days, building trust instead of fear. A support team that treats a payout request as a customer service, not an interrogation. Bots actually policed. A loot system explained honestly rather than shrouded in mystery. Planet Partners genuinely supported instead of quietly starved. That game would have been extraordinary. It would have had 100,000 players, not 1,100.

And it wouldn't also have the population of "frustrated players" we have these days... When you have time, go on the calypso forum... If you get into a heated discussion, you'll see what zero tolerance means on this forum...

Every single criticism in this article is really a mourning for that version. I didn't write 13 parts about a game I hate — you don't spend 2,300 hours and two decades on something you hate.

I wrote them about a game I wanted to love, that kept giving me reasons not to...

And this is my honest message to MindArk, if it ever reaches them:

you were sitting on the most original idea in the MMO industry, and you optimized it for quarterly revenue instead of greatness. Every design choice we've dissected in this guide — the fragmented market, the Calypso-first Codex, the fear-based withdrawal process, the silence — made you a little more money in the short term and cost you the game you could have built. Unreal Engine 5 won't fix that. Repainting a house doesn't repair its foundations.

So — my final advice to you, the reader?

If you want a great MMORPG, play something else; there are a hundred better ones. If you want to make money, real life pays 100 times faster. But if you're curious about the strangest, boldest, most gloriously flawed experiment in gaming history — and you can afford to treat every euro you put in as the price of a ticket, not an investment — then go and see it for yourself. Just go in with open eyes, a hard budget, and zero illusions. Test the withdraw button early. Never deposit what you can't lose. And the day it stops being fun, walk away without looking back.

That's all I ever wanted this guide to do: not to stop you from playing, but to stop you from being fooled. 😉

Bonus part: Account Locked!