You really don’t understand the simple concept that CCP makes more money from the current system than they ever would from the system you’re suggesting, they would literally be cutting their revenue stream rather than growing it
The only value PLEX has is as omega time, yes you can buy skins with it but the number of people doing that is small compared to the number paying for game time with it, without the demand for PLEX for omega time CCP would sell a lot less PLEX than they currently do, its very very easy to understand this, people arne’t going to magically keep buying PLEX from CCP when there is little to no ingame market for it anymore
Pretty much hits the nail on the head. Op seems to think everyone has two accounts and in my case and no doubt loads of others. I only got 1 these days.
I know few people who are in same situation and they fund their one account by selling sp to keep their account active on omega status.
Cypherous
Your post contains unsupported claims, factual errors, and displays a lack of understanding of fundamental economic principles which have been explicitly mentioned here several times…
Given the way you started out, I’m not going to correct any part of it.
Where do you think that isk for the Plex comes from? If people aren’t using Plex, then they aren’t buying it for isk. If they aren’t buying it for isk then the people who buy it for cash have no one to sell it too.
Sure skins and extractors drive demand as well. But it would still result in a net loss.
Let’s say we have 1k players who plex all their accounts and are forced to switch 1 to a subscription. That’s now 1k months worth of plex not being consumed (at roughly 20 bucks per 500) sure ccp is now making 15 dollars for those 1k a month on subs. But that’s still a loss of 5 dollars per. So we start out 5k down.
This also means there are now 500k more unused plex on the market. Sure that may drive prices down a tiny bit, and hey maybe some people will spin up extra accounts which will use up some of that excess. But it still results in less demand.
That’s without even taking into account the people who simply can’t afford to pay cash for a sub for one reason or another. Maybe they have kids and can’t spare the cash but have time to play. Maybe they are a student. Maybe they live somewhere with a shitty conversion rate. Doesn’t matter, those players who each generate 20 dollars worth of plex revenue will be forced to quit.
Some of them may even gave multiple accounts.
Let’s say we have even 100 of those players with 10 accts each. That’s now 20k dollars of lost revenue per month and another 500k unused plex on the market.
The more the demand drops, the more the price drops, the less incentive there is for people to buy them for cash.
Then you’ve got all the semi-casual players who plex their accounts when they can but are just fine playing as alphas who wouldn’t get a sub and you’ve got even more revenue lost (even if it’s just for a few months here and there) also reducing demand for Plex.
And I think you can see where this is going.
And you think that somehow between ship skins, skill extractors, and the people who might be willing to start up a couple alt accounts if the Plex price dropped that it would be enough to counter all that loss of revenue from the plummeting demand for Plex?
No i think you’re reading your own posts there, its extremely simple logic that you seem to be unwilling or unable to understand, given the fact you’re posting with an alt i have to be inclined to think you’re just trolling at this point, its been explained in very simple terms that every account that pays with PLEX makes CCP more money each month than via a subscription, this is a fact that cannot be argued
So even if every account were to pay for a subscription instead of by PLEX then CCP would, as a result of the simple fact above, make less money per month while also losing all the alpha players who don’t want to actually pay to play the game, or do you honestly think people who can currently play for free are going to just simply accept that they now have to pay to play
We’ve already had a situation where there was an ingame premium currency, it was called aurum, and it was rarely used for anything, as i said, PLEX only has a value because its consumed, without the option to purchase omega with it there would be a substantial decline in the demand for PLEX, as such people would be less inclined to supply it and the price would drop as a result as people tried to sell all the PLEX they had left, its a very simple concept
The reason you don’t want to try to correct anything i’ve said is because you actually can’t
I’m constantly hearing people saying if only eve had dust integrated into it on pc instead of a isolated console game, I wonder if this would have boosted eve population a few time’s. Although that would make the space ship side of eve grow slower with update’s so meh I’m selfishly glad It’s this way.
Cypherous
Were were never going to have an interesting discussion, but your leading with “you’re posting from an alt” in a discussion that does not depend on EVE knowledge is a “show stopper” for me.
You have a right to post of course, and if so hopefully others will read them. But I will not.
It becomes relevant because you have already shown you don’t understand how finances or plex work. So by posting on an alt you also can’t display any provable understanding or history with the game in general.
If no credibility can be established for you. Why should your argument be considered to have any merit?
Bjorn
I didn’t consider “bling” (skins etc) from the start. It was an assumption at the time, but an earlier poster informally supported it.
Everything I’ve said is related to two largely independent markets:
ISK for PLEX to keep the accounts of high-income players active. Clearly these people earn more ISK that they need for their in-game activities
RL money to PLEX to ISK to pay for in-game items (raw materials, ships, modules, etc etc). VClearly these people have (1) Less ISK they need for what they wish to spend, and (2) RL cash they are prepared to spend to obtain in-game items
The two are connected via the ISK/PLEX exchange rate, which (assuming CCP don’t change the RL cash price of PLEX) is set by the in-game market.
Any analysis must consider the second of those: the propensity of EVE players to spend RL cash to obtain in-game items.
My claim is that the amount of cash they are prepared to spend won’t be significantly affected by high-ISK-income individuals paying for one subscription.
This makes some assumptions):
That manufacturing efficiency in EVE won’t be significantly affected by freeloaders paying for one subscription. This could possibly become an issue if many (e.g. 30+ %) of the high-ISK-income players stopped playing
That the indirect RL/cash market will “clear” via the ISK/PLEX exchange rate
Well you’re entitled to think that, and you’re entitled to your opinion on PLEX, but i’m here posting with my main its courtesy that you do the same if you genuinely believe what you’re claiming, at the end of the day we both know i’m right but you’ve dug this hole and rather than just get out of it you’re committed to digging
Sure, but in order for people to convert RL money in to ISK there NEEDS to be a market for PLEX, i mean i can go and spend $500 on PLEX but if nobody wants to buy these PLEX from me because they have no use for them, they aren’t worth nay ISK, this is the part you’re seemingly struggling with, there has to be a use for PLEX otherwise they have no ingame value, and omega time is what gives PLEX the vast majority of their value, without that people arne’t going to consume the same number of PLEX each month which means demand drops and supply increases which in turn means the prices drop
For the longest time I have been wondering why they don’t just simply raise Omega monthly price when paid in Plex, while at the same time lowering the Plex and sub prices on their website.
Sure there would be some players that would leave, but also some that would stay longer and have better paying new ones. The population would just simply shift, but there would be a dip until it comes back to normal. How big and how much of a dip and shift depends on how much they would adjust the prices.
How would this work ?
If you raise the ingame monthly plex price, then you accomplish the following:
Harder to multibox - good for the game all around and gets more new players to stay longterm due to better environment
Harder to bot - obvious benefits
Deplete some of the current plex hoards - obvious benefits to the whole game
By lowering the Plex and monthly subs on their website they would achieve the following:
Become competetive with RMT prices to the point that many RMT customers will no longer see the point of using RMT and switch.
Make up in sales volume any losses incurred from lowering the prices, especially when more people switch to purchasing from CCP instead of RMT
Lower sub prices will get more people to sub and switch from using Plex
By increasing monthly plex price but lowering the costs of actual sub at the same time, you also revert a lot of the damage that has been done to the games economy as it will shift back towards ISK / items / building materials quite a bit. At the same time it will take a huge chunk out of botting and game damaging mass multiboxing.
On the player front game will become far more engaging and interesting since there will be less inactive / AFK style characters around but more active ones.
The question is of course how much of the playerbase would CCP be willing to shed for such changes, which to some point they could regulate with setting of these prices.
I also believe that players that switch to sub, instead of just plexing, tend to stay with Eve Online much longer and play more, vs those that do not. Note that this is on average, not exceptions or upswings or downswings, but rather long term average.
So having more players on subs vs plexing is a very good thing for everyone.
Your joking? surely your joking! Playing for free because i can use ISK for sub is not playing for free. Plex isnt just put on a market by an AI (although that would become a huge isk sink).
PLEX is on the market because some one impatient wants a large amount of isk and they want it now, so they whip out the credit card and turn atleast $20 usd into 500 plex, than they log in and put the plex on the market. Than i take my 1.7b to uy that plex for sub.
In the process i just gave someone isk to pay for my sub, which is double the price per month if i was to buy a 1 year sub. a 1 year sub cost about ~120 usd (give your take some). Now if i buy someone plex that bought enough plex for 12 months which would be 6000 plex, the person buying that plex just paid about ~240 usd, doubling CCP income over that of a basic 1 year sub.
Every time i see people mention that people that plex their accounts are paying for “free” those that buy plex to sub are just having someone pay for 2 months total time than what someone would pay for 1 month.
Are you talking about having to pay an additional sub for the ability to multibox? and is there a limit to the number you can run or unlimited as there is now?
My suggestion is that every Omega player should pay one month’s worth of RL money per calendar month to CCP. Exactly how that’s implemented by CCP isn’t important.
People who do not pay any money to CCP are certainly paying for free. Whether requiring freeloaders to pay to play would increase CCP’s revenue seems to be a discussion that’s beyond this forum.
The “missing link” is this:
The demand by non-freeloaders for ISK to buy “EVE stuff” is largely independent of what the freeloaders do. There’s no reason to expect that ISK-poor non-freeloaders suddenly want to spend less RL money because a completely different group of people (the ISK-rich freeloaders) spend money with CCP.
I expect the “invisible hand of the market” will automagically take care of the details. But if it doesn’t work out as I expect, I’m confident CCP will find a way.
They are not playing for free, they are not freeloaders. Someone has already paid CCP for those PLEXES they use. It does not matter who. What matter is it’s already been paid for in advance.
You seem to misunderstand how it works. PLEXES don’t drop ingame for free, someone has to buy them with RL money to seed them into the game. If I buy 500 plexes with my money, I give to you, an Alpha, and you use them to activate 30 days of OMEGA, you are not a freeloader, because CCP already has the money for those 30 days - I would have paid for them.
The suggestion is about total income, not about how it’s obtained today. Clearly it implies changes compared to today’s model.
What’s interesting to CCP (and stated in the thread title “… growing CCP’s income”) is about
RL money, and it obviously implies a change in the ISK/PLEX exchange rate (among other things).
Replies based on a “zero-sum” assumption miss the point.
