CCP Games' stellar MMO has been continually breaking the record for concurrent users playing on a single server, all through the past year or two. And now that the Chinese Beta phase has opened, EVE Online raised the bar once again. In the first day alone, more than 200,000 people registered for the game, and a peak of over 30,000 concurrent users was reached soon afterwards - which CCP claims to be a new world record.

"It was quite amazing to see the population of EVE China exceed the population of Iceland in the second day of open beta testing", said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP. "EVE China has been an exciting collaboration project and continues to be so, as we continue to refine the experience to accommodate for the steep growth rate of both our English and Chinese worlds."

The Chinese version of EVE Online (nicknamed Serenity) was announced earlier this year, through a collaboration between developer CCP Games and Optic Communications, and runs independently of the Western edition of EVE Online (Tranquility). The game is projected for release in the territory by the end of summer, and prices are believed to be around $3.5 for a CD-key promo package (includes a CD-key card, DVD client, player guide, and postcard), with an $8 monthly fee after that.

According to some reports, the game has gone through an extremely severe examination by China's authorities in order to prevent Chinese players from coming in contact with anything that might violate Chinese policy and related laws. This is believed to have resulted in a shrinking of the game's content, as Chinese law requires that all "drug dealing, political, or religious content" must be removed or changed. It's expected that many of these elements have been saved however, by appearing in a different form.

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