Chicken Pizza
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Posted - 2011.07.20 10:11:00 -
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Shame on you people for suggesting buying PLEX and selling for ISK. PLEX is actually an economically flawed system, due to CCP's inability to manage their finances. To quote a friend of mine on the issue:
"Short term it works, because you get the people with a bit more disposable income paying for those who have more time but less real money get to play - in return for a level of participation in the EVE market (i.e. the 400M ISK they pay per month - this is just transferred around the economy). Net effect should be an increase in players (well - accounts anyway, all that matters) and an increase in payers. Nobody plays for free in EVE - someone has always paid $17.50 (ish) for 30 days of time.
Regular subs off a credit card are easy to manage and the income's predictable - they pay up front, and when the game time's up they either pay again, or stop paying and stop playing.
Thing is, they tied PLEX to a virtual economy, by having it as a normal saleable item. Which means that players set the price, and in turn means there's margins to be traded, and the PLEX becomes both a unit of game time and a commodity on the virtual market.
So you get stocks building up.
A PLEX's lifecycle is that a person buys it for $17.50 - income for CCP.
At some point in the future it's activated - they get 30 days of game time.
Only once that 30 days is up does a player somewhere need to pay CCP some more money to get another 30 days made available.
All well and good if PLEX is used within a month or two, but start thinking about them sitting in a hangar for 3 months... 6 months... a year.
So CCP have then had their income front-loaded - the 30 days of game time for each are paid for, but CCP are yet to deliver that service. And more income is only likely after that service delivery is completed.
If there are a ton - tens of thousands - of these 30-day tokens being hoarded, then at some point a Real Life accountant is going to start raising an eyebrow. This looks a lot like a potential liability in real money.
If a significant number of people stopped paying $ and instead started using up the stocks of PLEX then CCP's income for a month... 3 months... 6 months... could significantly drop. And if they hadn't accounted properly for this then they've probably already spent the money from before. Investors see income dropping off, things go bad in bean-counter land.
So they made PLEXes transportable. No way was this for player convenience. Anything they could do to destroy PLEXes is a double win for them. They've taken the $17.50 intended for 30 days of service, but not only do they not have to actually deliver that service any more, then (given stable membership levels) someone has to pay for a replacement to keep playing (more money) or use up the outstanding stock (reducing the liability).
Now PLEXes are irreversibly convertible to a new, non-game-time-redeemable new currency. Makes it dead easy for them to track and start writing off that potential liability. And it both eats into the old PLEX stocks, and encourages more to be bought with $17.50 to get actual game time, activated now or at least "soon", instead of monocles. Of course, this will take bloody ages unless the new items are outrageously priced. Cue the $60 monocle.
CCP always get $60 per monocle. They may already have been paid this in the past though. They're counting on the distance between people with lots of ISK and the people - now several steps removed - who actually paid $60 in the past.
Wouldn't work if they'd taken the seemingly more sensible (to us) approach of removing PLEX and having 30 days of game time cost 3500 AUR and buying AUR direct from cash - because then they'd have the same liability problem just expressed in a different way."
So actually, at this stage in the game, less PLEX is healthier for CCP and the game's economy.
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