There's nothing new in this, and the "1.5 mio hexagons" are only in a square of roughly 1225x1225. I've played browser games with exactly the same premise (but

There's nothing new in this, and the "1.5 mio hexagons" are only in a square of roughly 1225x1225. I've played browser games with exactly the same premise (but without the whole pay-to-win aspect) back in 2001 and 2002. They might have a meta game that's interesting in the long run, but they universally lack a challenging short-term game to keep you playing and interested while you're waiting for larger plans to come to fruition. Eve gives the player that by having them do short NPC hunting missions, explore the galaxy or engage in PvP, all of which is adrenaline-packed and visually engaging. A browser game will have a hard time duplicating that. Might be possible with WebGL, but that excludes a lot of players.