Eve Online is making the biggest change in its 13-year history, by going free-to-play.

In its latest update, called Ascension, it is introducing an innovative new system for opening up the world to non-paying users. A new class of player, dubbed “Alpha Clones”, will be able to sign-up without paying the monthly subscription fee, currently £9.99.

In exchange, these players receive a more limited account than the paying players, rechristened “Omega Clones”.

The move is in part a response to changes in the gaming market, where free to play games are dominating mobile gaming and subscription-based gaming revenue has all but dried up.

The space-based sim, often jokingly described as “spreadsheets and spaceships”, has a unique set of problems compared to most of its competitors. Eve is almost entirely player-driven, with huge player-led “corporations” providing the driving force of the game’s intrigue and excitement.

That’s partially because, unlike competitors such as World of Warcraft, every single player exists in the same shared universe. That means the most connected players in the game world have the power to reshape the entire economy – so much so that CCP Games, the Icelandic-based company that develops Eve, has an in-house economist to make sure that nothing goes awry.

The shared universe meant that Eve didn’t feel like it was safe to offer the same sort of accounts that other free-to-play games provide, since the in-game economy could be wrecked if the balance was wrong.

Instead, unlike many free-to-play games, the full scope of Eve’s universe is open to every player, paying or not. An Alpha Clone can go anywhere in the world, join any group, and achieve any objective. Instead, the limitations are focused on speed and efficiency: the clones take longer to learn skills, and don’t have access to some of the higher-powered ships in the game.

“Access to trading, industry, and exploration skills will allow Alpha pilots to explore the vast, mysterious universe, harvest its raw materials, fulfil their shrewd economic dreams, and construct the war machines that make Eve battles famous,” CCP says.

Thanks to the sheer scale of Eve’s player-run corporations, open conflagrations are rare. But when they occur, a major tactic is to oppose the enormous Titan spaceships captained by the most prominent players with swarms of smaller, cheaper ships – something new players will be able to join in with from day one.

The new clone states are launching alongside a second major change to Eve: the first full story-mode the game has seen, a 10-hour fully voice-acted journey that takes the player on an extensive trip through all the game’s major playstyles. It’s a big reversal of the previous approach Eve took towards new players, which was to throw them in the deep-end after a brief tutorial explaining how to navigate the user interface.

It’s not the first time CCP has lowered the cost of playing Eve. An earlier update introduced the concept of PLEX, which allowed users to pay for game time using in-game currency and use real money to buy cash in Eve’s universe. But that update, while perfect for long-term users wanting to play for less, did little for new players, who would have to spend the 14-day trial period grinding relentlessly in order to earn enough cash to pay for their first month.