What do I legitimately expect? In a year the rest of the racial suits, weapons, and vehicles will be out. The core will be about 90% stable (whatever that means) with a lot of the terrain glitches fixed, sensitivity sliders, and all that jazz. We will have another map. And most importantly team queue for FW will make constant 16v16 battles a reality.

At that point we could legitimately be peaking at 1000 players and limping into the second anniversary.

Things like player-to-player trading will be implimented. Player trading of boosters will provide additional cashflow, but Dust is still in the red for a while - CCP can handle it though. MTACs, MAVs, and new infantry classes like grenadier, etc. are all possibilities 18+ months down the road. The thing is, CCP has a long-term vision and they are stubborn little *******. New Eden is their product and Dust is just one arm of that. Ya see, once all the above is fixed and implimented, the only thing to do is build on top of the solid foundation.

That comes in three primary categories:
1) Enhance competitive play (PC, FW, raiding, balance rewards, etc.) to keep the core FPS cbt vets coming back for more.
2) Impliment PVE that will attract more casual players who may be driven off by stomping vets otherwise
3) Work on the EvE link hardcore. Things like niche but lucrative manufacturing Eve side that requires salvage gained through Dust PVE will draw more people with EvE accounts into the fold. AUR items to enhance this activity Dust side will supplement monetization.

... which are all turbocharged by one thing: PS4.

All it takes is a port to the new console; I'm not sure how the code would work but if they can run Carbon on the PS4 with 64v64 and the above changes within the next 3 years, this game isn't going anywhere. Alternatively, a port to the PC would open up an entirely new market and make adoption by EvE players more likely, but I'm thinking CCP wants to make console Dust work.

SOMEWHERE in all of that, CCP will push a hardcore marketing blitz to attract new players, likely in conjunction with the PS4 release. Conveniently, this will be well after PS2 arrives on PS4 so perhaps they are hoping to grab bored players.

Who knows.

The PlayStation 3 uses the Cell Architecture. That's a system for getting a bunch of different processors to work together. On most other devices you have a single powerful processor, or perhaps a powerful central processor and then another processor specifically designed for graphics. On a cell machine, you have many smaller processors (on the PS3 it's six) that are each dedicated to specific tasks. In theory all those extra processors let you do more processing, but only if you can keep them all busy. It takes development time to get the most out of the machine. Worse, this work must be done on the back end. If you're porting to a machine with less memory you can just scale all the textures down and render everything at a lower resolution. But if you're porting to or from a cell system, the coding team has to crawl down into the guts of the game engine and make all sorts of really fundamental changes to how the system works. The point is, it's difficult and expensive to port to and from cell-based machines.

The PS4 will move away from the six-headed beast of cell and embrace the x86-64 architecture. That's the same architecture that runs most 64 bit PCs. Since the Xbox 360 uses PowerPC architecture instead of x86, we could end up with a situation where the PS4 has more in common with your average home desktop PC than with the other consoles. Under normal circumstances you could argue that emulation is the answer. If the newer machines have enough power, they can simply simulate the behavior of the old machines. The problem is that emulating the cell architecture on a non-cell machine would be a nightmare. Even if the new machine is ten times faster than the one you're emulating, you're talking about emulating multiple concurrent processors. While processors have been getting incrementally faster over the years, their clock speeds have only improved marginally. More of the new speed comes from muti-core processors, and mapping a (for example) single quad-core processor to simulate the behavior of a six-distinct processor cell is a murderously difficult problem. It might even be impossible to get it exactly right. The differences between multiple processors sharing a pair of memory pools and a single multi-core processor with many levels of cache and a large single pool of RAM are extreme. The real irony is: The better the old game was optimized for the PS3, the harder it would be to port or emulate on the PS4.