Don't count EVE Online as over and out just yet. The long-running space sandbox reported a remarkably good year for 2016, posting an increase in players and profits from the year previous.

CCP announced this week that its revenues rose from $65.7M in 2015 to $86.1M in 2016, representing a healthy 30% increase. Even better, the game's daily active user count doubled over the year. These could well be thanks to EVE's shift to a free-to-play model, which propelled the game up to over 50,000 concurrent users by last November. The company also reported that its VR titles broke even in 2016.

Just came across this article but it is a few weeks old:

http://massivelyop.com/2017/02/28/eve-online-saw-big-bump-in-players-and-profits-in-2016/
This is overall good news for CCP as a whole but I doubt this really affects those players waiting on Project Nova.
BTW, I find it funny that CCP's VR titles were noted to have "broke even" as CCP seems heavily invested in VR outside of EVE Online.

I still don't consider EVE to be free to play with so much content locked behind a subscription. It's a really great demo, but I struggle to consider it truely F2P

I'm certain there is a healthy number of new players in there, though I am curious how many have joined the ranks of the New Eden Alt Army

I can find ways around that

I still don't consider EVE to be free to play with so much content locked behind a subscription. It's a really great demo, but I struggle to consider it truely F2P

These could well be thanks to EVE's shift to a free-to-play model, which propelled the game up to over 50,000 concurrent users by last November. The company also reported that its VR titles broke even in 2016.