Player-Made Billboards Return: Advertising and Propaganda in New Eden (2023)

Player-Made Billboards Return: Advertising and Propaganda in New Eden (2023)

If you undock in any busy trade hub and look up, the screens are talking to you. Some of New Eden's billboards advertise fizzy Quafe and planetary tourism in the voice of the setting itself. Others are made by other players - recruitment pitches, faction war cries, courier-service commercials, propaganda aimed squarely at a rival coalition. On 13 June 2023, alongside the Viridian expansion, CCP switched the second kind back on after years of letting it go quiet. The return was small and easy to miss, but it reopened one of the most distinctly EVE corners of the game: a place where players advertise to other players, inside the fiction, on screens the whole cluster can see.

Billboards before player content

Billboards are not new. They have been an ambient part of New Eden almost since the start - screens fixed to stations and floating along the highways between systems, cycling through in-universe commercials and CONCORD public-service messages. They were enough of a fixture by late 2006 that a patch notice that December flagged client crashes happening "especially around billboards," which tells you they were everywhere even then. For years they doubled as a news surface: a 2013 forum discussion treats the station and CONCORD billboards as something you could read for in-game headlines, part of the furniture that made a station feel inhabited.

What none of that early material had was you. The billboards showed what CCP put on them, and that was the end of it. The shift from a CCP-controlled ad rack to a canvas anyone could submit to is the story that follows.

The Great Billboard Propaganda Contest

The turn came with the March 2016 release, in the Citadel era. CCP, in its own words, "replaced every advertising billboard in New Eden with a new, more configurable version to which we can now send all manner of video content." Where the old boards had been baked into the client, the new ones could receive video. To show the feature off, CCP ran The Great Billboard Propaganda Contest, inviting capsuleers to make their own commercials for their corporations, alliances, and causes and have them "displayed for the whole cluster to see on the billboards that line the trade routes." The winners were announced on 6 April 2016 - handles Visari Qahlt, Dmitry Nazarov, and Nikel Ivanovich - and their videos went up in space.

A one-off contest was not the point, though. On 18 July 2016 CCP Falcon posted that submissions were now open on a rolling basis, and the announcement spelled out exactly what kind of content was welcome: player service advertisements, plus corporation, alliance, coalition, and factional propaganda. That single line did two things. It made player-made video a permanent feature rather than a stunt, and it gave official blessing to the idea that a capsuleer might make ads for other capsuleers - including for pay. The timing was no accident. The spring of 2016 was the height of World War Bee, and Reddit was awash in coalition propaganda; CCP was simply opening an in-game surface for energy the players already had.

The friction showed up immediately. A thread from June 2016 complained that a handful of well-organised groups were already hogging the lion's share of screen time, with no published criteria for who got picked. The selection process was opaque from day one, and it stayed that way.

The long neglect

What happened next is the part most players who lived through it remember with a wince. The feature did not get killed. It was left alone until it stopped working in any meaningful sense.

The root cause was old. As far back as 2009 a player had noted that the billboards ran on "strange antiquated code," that the developer who wrote it had long since left CCP, and that you could warp to the site of a long-removed promotional stargate and find a single billboard still floating there, doing nothing - a literal dead screen orbiting an empty patch of space. The 2016 rebuild gave the boards new capability but did not solve the underlying problem: there was no good tooling to publish to them.

CCP said as much, on the record. In October 2018, asked on Reddit whether the billboard and advertising team was simply dead, CCP_Guard replied:

Unfortunately this project has been in a bit of stasis due to shifting priorities and lack of publishing tools. Currently every video asset has to be checked in as part of a patch and await release. Same goes for removing outdated videos.

In other words, putting up a new ad - or taking down an old one - meant bundling the video into a client patch and waiting for the next deployment. There was no console, no queue, nothing a community manager could do in an afternoon. The submission mailbox became a black hole. By February 2019 a player titled their thread "7 months and still no answers," reporting that the boards were full of videos for corps and alliances that no longer existed and that support kept telling people to wait for a reply that never came. The most upvoted explanation underneath was blunt: the responsible developer had quit more than two years earlier.

The nadir came in 2020. By that April, capsuleers were openly complaining that there was effectively one advert running across the entire universe - a commercial for in-universe spectacles - looping 23 hours a day, every day. "Imagine being a new player," one post ran. "You've been told New Eden is supposed to be a hyper-mercantile, dystopian-capitalist war economy. But somehow there is only one advert in the universe, it's for spectacles, and it's on 23/7." A companion thread a few days later, when the single ad finally changed, captured the same lonely feeling from a newcomer's angle: New Eden seemed to have exactly one company with a marketing budget. The screens were still on. They just had nothing to say.

It is worth being precise about this: there was never a clean removal date, no patch note announcing that player ads were gone. The feature decayed. The pipeline silted up, the inbox went unread, and what had been a living advertising layer dwindled to a single immortal commercial for fizzy drinks.

The Triglavian takeover

There was one striking exception, and it came from CCP's writers rather than its engineers. On 15 March 2019, during the Triglavian Invasion arc, the Triglavian Collective hijacked New Eden's billboards. Across the cluster the screens cut to a cryptic looping broadcast - a piece of in-fiction storytelling that used the ad network as a narrative weapon. It was a reminder of what the billboards could be when someone actually pushed content to them: not just a rack of commercials but a shared canvas the whole universe looks at, which is exactly why a hostile faction seizing them landed as menacing rather than mundane.

The return with Viridian

The pipeline came back on 8 May 2023, when CCP announced that player-made video billboards would return with the Viridian expansion, and the first new player ads went live in June. The process this time was deliberately gated. Submissions run through an EVE Help Desk guidelines article rather than a forgotten mailbox; CCP applies a critical eye, and ads that scam other players or aim to damage their assets are off the table. The ads appear in stations and around stargates across the cluster, the same surface they always lived on.

Confirmation that it had actually taken hold came, fittingly, from a player annoyed that it did not go far enough. In November 2023 the head of a well-known courier network posted that capsuleers were clearly making station ads again - he had seen commercials for Quafe and planetary tourism alongside "some kind of Torpedo Delivery Service" on the big station screens - and his only complaint was that he could not click them to learn more. After years of a single looping advert, the problem had inverted: there was now enough player-made content on the boards that people wanted to interact with it.

Billboards as a profession

The trade in player-made ads and propaganda is older than the billboards that now carry it. Long before the 2016 feature, capsuleers were hiring one another to make corp signatures, alliance logos, forum banners, recruitment videos and propaganda art - the kind of work advertised in the EVE forums' service sections for as long as those sections have existed. The configurable billboards did not create this craft; they handed an established profession a brand-new in-game canvas, and CCP gave it an official nod when it explicitly welcomed "player service advertisements" in 2016.

The clearest example is a service thread run by the handle Crimson_Draufgange, which carried a dedicated "Billboard ads I've created" section and read like a real freelance shop. Pricing was tiered - propaganda posters at a flat rate, EVE art on a sliding scale, animated billboard motion graphics at the top end - and there was a genuine commercial workflow behind it: a 50 percent deposit up front, refundable right up until work began, with the remaining 50 percent due once the client got to recieve a first draft, and revisions negotiated from there. Others specialised. The handle Avio_Yaken offered paid video editing for "propaganda, recruitment videos and billboard ads," advertised familiarity with "the tight format demanded of billboard ads," kept a YouTube portfolio, and capped projects in the region of 500 million ISK. Seti_Star sustained a one-person poster-and-propaganda studio across 2020 and 2021, serving multiple corporations and alliances on a scaled price list. Claina ran a long-lived logo-and-banner thread that stretched to dozens of pages. Matt_Duskson dealt in signatures, propaganda, and banners; Lan_Wang was still taking commissions for corp and alliance logos, killboard banners, and website art as recently as 2025. Payment came in ISK, in PLEX, sometimes in ships.

There was a demand side too. Corporations posted looking to hire artists outright - one Warhammer-themed group advertised that it had already had recruitment banners made and wanted more. None of this was ever a large industry; the opacity and favouritism objections that surrounded the billboards from the start are part of why CCP kept the official surface small and curated. But as a cottage profession it is remarkably persistent, alive across every era of the feature's own neglect and revival.

The propaganda metagame

The reason any of this matters more than a cosmetic flourish is that propaganda in EVE is not decoration - it is part of how the wars are fought. Morale moves fleets, and a well-made recruitment video or a brutal piece of enemy-mocking art does real work in a campaign. During World War Bee in 2016, one prolific propaganda producer, the handle dartias, wrote an open letter to the community that put the case plainly: "The propaganda metagame in Eve is amazing, and the fact that so many capsuleers on both sides have been producing and sharing such quality offerings... is one of the reasons that Eve Online stands head and shoulders above all other MMOs." The same letter then turned that pride into a plea for some grace toward the player on the other end of the poster - propaganda as a thing that binds the community even as it divides the map.

The academic Marcus Carter has argued that EVE's propaganda is best understood not as a marketing industry that surrounds the game but as something that emerges from within play itself, acting on the game from the outside - a persuasive media he terms an "emitext." That is an unusually good description of what a billboard ad is. It is made inside the fiction, by a player, to be seen by other players inside the fiction, and its purpose is to change how the war goes. The 2023 return did not invent any of that culture. It just gave it back the brightest screen in the universe to play on.