CCP Games has begun migrating EVE Online's server code from Python 2.7 to Python 3, according to a developer post on the game's official site.
The game has run on Stackless Python 2.7 since 2010, and Python 2 itself reached its end of life in 2020, the post said. A first stage of changes deployed on August 25 made the code "Python 3-ready while it still runs on Python 2.7," according to the announcement.
The codebase spans about 2.4 million lines of Python across roughly 20,000 files, and CCP's analysis found 95.9% of files already compatible with both Python versions, leaving about 3,300 lines of deprecated syntax to fix, the post said.
CCP cited three reasons for the migration: Python 3's performance gains, access to modern debugging and profiling tools no longer maintained for Python 2, and language simplifications including unified text handling and the removal of arbitrary integer limits, according to the announcement. The company set no completion date, calling it "the beginning of a long road ahead," with more testing planned on its Singularity test server.
A 2.4 million-line, 16-year-old production codebase moving off a language version with no upstream support for six years is a reminder that migration debt does not go away quietly. Few teams run their business on a two-decade-old game server, but the same math, a cost that compounds every day a deprecated runtime stays in production, applies at any scale.