I am not a LOL player, but I noticed this in my youtube today.
It will be interesting to see the updates to the NES and the in game market when this becomes law.
Personally I would not be upset if PLEX was grandfatherd out of the game entirely, if people want to play with the 30 alts they can sub like a regular person.
They can do away with PLEX entirely and just convert NES and Paragon things to use ISK.
Itâs just a good thing theyâre not still also selling Aurum.
I donât think CCP would need to do anything more than establish a fixed exchange rate of PLEX to dollar, euro, etc. and display the playerâs local currency value in the NES alongside the price in PLEX (or maybe even just show the exchange rate somewhere on the screen).
I can pretty much guarantee, though: PLEX wonât be going away.
Isnât CCP owned by Pearl Abyss now? A South Korean company. So wouldnât this ruling have no bearing on PLEX and the NES? How does that work?
AFAIK, the fact that their parent company is South Korean would not change CCPâs obligations, at least as it pertains to EU customers. CCP is based in Iceland, which while not an EU member, is part of the EFTA and EEA.
Players outside the EU would not fall under the protections of an EU regulatory body, but it may be one of those situations where itâs cheaper and easier to have one system rather than two (e.g., one for EU players, and one for everyone else).
It does not matter who owns the company. It matters where the company operates. Since CCP and EVe operate in the EU area, they would have to abide by this law and show the real world currency prices equivalents next to their arbitrary digital currency prices.
Thatâs not the goal of this law anyway. The goal is to make companies and publishers show how much their digital currency costs in real world money. This should illustrate how deceptive their pricing really is (showcased by the LOL skin examples where skins always cost more than a low tier and much less than a high tier DC package) and thus allow people to make more informed decisions about purchases.
Just a reminder:
At its heart, PLEX is an anti RMT mechanism.
Itâs spectacularly successful as an anti rmt measure.
It wonât have much impact on EVE, I think.
Thereâs a PDF with a bunch of pointers to game companies about the changes:
I wonât link the PDF here, but you can search for âkey principles on in-game virtual currenciesâ on European Commission, official website - European Commission to find it.
I see that the EU requires for example gaming companies to put the real world price next to the in-game currency price:
This is easily done by showing in the only PLEX store EVE has, the NES, not only the PLEX prices but also the prices in your local currency:
And theyâll have to allow players to buy any amount of PLEX instead of only packs of certain sizes:
So instead of this:
We get a simple 1 PLEX = âŹ0.0499 pack with choice how many you want to buy.
As I see nothing to stop them from giving bonuses for larger packs, I donât see why CCP cannot continue giving bonus PLEX as usual for buying more than an X amount at once, like the extra free PLEX you get for 1000 PLEX packs and bigger.
The only trouble I see here is that players should also be able to refund unused PLEX:
Which in case of bonus amounts is easily exploited by players when they buy a pack of 1000 PLEX, get 100 PLEX extra, then refund 800 of it but keep the bonus.
So I wouldnât be surprised if the bonus is going to be delayed until after the refund period has expired. Or that refunding also requires you to refund the bonus.
I havenât seen everything, but while itâs going to be some extra work for CCP to comply I donât think much will change for us.
TL;DR: I expect a couple of changes, but nothing major for us players.
Pretty much. The main point is that prices should be easier to compare with RL values, and to make it more obvious when special discounts or bonuses (like these bonus PLEX because there were never packs without the bonus) are just deceptive offers.
One change that could happen is that CCP stops with their big bulk discounts, or reduces it at least.
As it is right now players pay much higher prices for one single month of Omega than they pay for per month when buying two years in bulk.
Very high âstandardâ prices of for example âŹ20 a month of Omega are part of CCPâs discount strategy, as it allows them to market bulk packs or âvalue packsâ that on first glance appear to have a lot of value and thus big discounts!
This is the case for Omega, but also for PLEX with the bulk bonuses.
These high standard prices will however work against CCP marketing once every item in the New Eden Store shows itâs high price in ⏠according to the (non-bulk) standard prices.
After all, there is not just one ⏠to PLEX ratio for CCP, but many.
The NES will look much more expensive than it actually is for bulk-buyers, but would be misleadingly cheap if CC picked the bulk price as standard, so I donât think CCP can legally do that either.
I bet CCP will have to strategically rethink their standard and bulk price discount and may have to reduce both the standard price and the % discount you can get if they want to make the NES more enticing once the âreal pricesâ are also shown.
Good change. Selling extra-services, boosts or microtransactions for additional money is okay, especially for a game that is otherwise free to play (at least as alpha). Everyone is free to take these offers or leave them. But hiding these transactionâs value behind artificial currencies is manipulative, especially towards children and teens. And should be rightfully restricted.
For EVE I donât expect much changes, just an additional ⏠value next to the PLEX price.
They have used real world equivalence in promoting the game. It will not be a stretch to code in game.
PLEX is a significant revenue for CCP (and PA) due to the fact that those players having more than just a few accounts are more than likely paying for their Omega using ISK - to buy PLEX.
The only Issue I see with this is:
I donât believe that Bulk PLEX sales are going away - itâs no different than for example a grocery store having a sale - get X amount and pay only Y$/âŹ, or Get 2 for the price of 1.
The main problem the EU Commision is trying to combat is when Gaming Industry have multiple layers of Currency Conversions - Diablo Immortal is a prime example of this where they have like 5-10 different âpremiumâ currencies (with no hard limit on how much you may spend on the game - standard for mobile gatcha games).
Here are the practices they want to crack down on.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_831
I wonder if CCP still does this below or something similar and if yes if it is sanctioned by this new EU initiative:
I hope the EU bans that too.
Manipulative predatory actions. That pop-up message may have been the lowest CCP has sunk.
from what iâm reading, since CCP is in iceland, and jurisdiction is in iceland, Iceland is NOT governed by european comissionâŚ
so they wouldnât have to actually abide by this as they arenât in the european union
CCP likely wants to keep access to the market in EU and not lose all of their EU players.
so basically as they are doing for us in the US with the sales tax, for you guys across the pond, they would have to show that info, but not for anyone outside of the EU
That is one possibility.
However itâs easier to not make exceptions, so people outside the EU may also benefit from these new rules.
