Dude, do you even know what you have written? You just got done telling me, “…every sub-MMO in history would have been a roaring financial success.” Clearly a sarcastic comment. You are clearly taking a shot at the notion of games making their money off subs (and you also have been posting about how you will never ever ever buy PLEX). Thus, to make money and keep the game going CCP must look to micro transactions…but now you are against those too. Or maybe you just have to disagree with everything I…
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It wasnt sarcastic, which is something I use only very rarely.
It was the logical conclusion of your own position.
Introducing PLEX as a token reward into the game, is the opposite of supporting micro-transactions.
False, as I buy subs from CCP, regardless of the PLEX situation.
So you really mean that a sub-based MMO will lead to a roaring success…then why are you wanting to hand out subs without any monetary compensation?
You are dodging and weaving and bobbing so much I’m surprised you don’t have whip lash at this point.
BTW, a “token reward” will do ■■■■ all to the price. Since your initial point was to reduce the price maybe you should have a nice cup of STFU.
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This was in response to your claim that MMO success is entirely based only on earning the maximum possible from paid services, as a rebuttal to me stating it requires much more than that to make a successful, healthy MMO.
Your attempt to ambiguate/obfuscate the sequence of the above is false.
Yeah, that is what firms tend try and do. They try to make as much money while reducing costs as much as possible. Crazy I know. And by doing so they tend to create more value than they can capture in terms of profits.
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And, as I stated, it is clearly not that simple, or every sub-MMO in history would have been a roaring financial success just by charging as much as possible for services.
There is much more to maintaining a healthy, profitable MMO, than that.
As in all enterprise, it is necessary to evolve services in reaction to client/market behavior.
Those which survive and thrive, are the ones capable of adapting to changing circumstances.
Tell me, Teckos. How many sub-based MMOs aside from EVE, have you played?
This does not follow from what I wrote. Maximizing profits does not translate into maximizing price.
The neoclassical economics rule for maximizing profits is to produce until:
marginal revenue = marginal cost.
That is the produce until the additional revenue earned from an additional unit of production is equal the additional cost of that additional unit of production.
That does not imply maximum price. For example, a monopolist that wants to maximize the price would sell just one unit. However a profit maximizing monopolist will generally sell more than one unit of output.
This is why economists make the worst businessmen.
Indeed.
But no businessman seeks to maximize his price…and nothing I have written implies that. At all.
Edit: Unless there is just one thing he is selling–i.e. a unique item like a work of art. But generally, if you are selling chicken bowls, you do not want to charge the highest price possible. You want to charge the price that will allow to earn the highest profits possible. If you can’t see the difference you are terrible businessman too @Salvos_Rhoska.
To my reading, all of what you have written not only implies that, but claims it overtly.
Economists dont account for the dynamism required to keep clients happy.
Customer retention is the end-all, be-all of an enterprise, even if it incurs a financial loss.
Especially in internet based services, there are numerous hugely successful companies that consistently operate at a massive fiscal loss, but because they have such an enormous market share and wide client base, they have no problem finding investors/loans etc.
Nothing is more important than keeping as many clients as possible within arms-reach, as happy/loyal as possible and still using your product rather than someone else’s.
It is in all cases cheaper and better to keep existing clients, than try to find new ones.
Even a client that has never, ever spent one cent on your product, is a valuable asset, as they not only form the basis of your potential future paying customers, but also tend to endorse your product to other potential customers.
An ingame PLEX reward for the content I proposed, will help retain clients (ie:potential future paying customers), as well as extend the period that CCP can sell PLEX based services in a bullish PLEX market, before its inevitable plateau and consequent downward trend.
The rate of PLEX introduction by this content, and as potentially reduced by the various alternatives I also proposed, will not significantly influence the PLEX market ingame, nor CCPs bottomline, owing to the client based behavior and type involved in generating them ingame.
The existing growth of the PLEX price (as demand over supply) and the volume of existing/paid PLEX is more than enough to take a small hit from ingame introduced PLEX, as a function of retaining those clients.
Any one individual would have to run over 250 of these sites.
It will still be, as always, more efficient and equitable for clients to simply buy PLEX from CCP, like before, rather than expend time/effort to grind the PLEX or the isk to purchase it.
That is, was, and always will be the reason to buy PLEX from CCP, and since CCP has consolidated all existing services into PLEX, and continues to introduce more PLEX services, it is to be expected that demand will continue to outstrip supply at an even greater rate than before.
As Ive stated before, it is not unusual (infact its the prevalent norm) for MMOs to offer reward tokens ingame, in the current MMO market. The system works, and constitutes part of the competetive edge of these providers inorder to consolidate market share of MMO players.
TLDR: The purpose is to:
- Extend the period of a bullish PLEX market, for as long as possible before inevitable plateau/down-trend.
- Retain as many clients as possible (especially new ones) until they hopefully, after personal investment in the game and learning to love it, become paying customers.
Sorry but can someone explain to me why high PLEX prices are actually an issue ? Is this not just a free market settling on a “fair” price based upon supply and demand ?
I assumed prices are rising due to increase in demand from skill injectors, sp farming, all the PLEX related services and players having more isk from relevant income buffs (as well as overall inflation of isk in the system) combined with a decrease in supply (check the PLEX graph over the last year the transactions are very clearly decreasing).
I also then assumed that high PLEX prices are not an issue because if they reached “crazy” levels more people would be inclined to buy and sell PLEX themselves to get the isk or purchase a subscription because the grinding time isn’t worth it.
EDIT: Just to add when I start playing PLEX was 300mil and I’ve yet to have any of my in-game-friends leave because of the PLEX price. Most of them leave due to other reasons mostly poor development and design decisions with the biggest one to date still being Incarna 
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My three core arguments are:
-
Its hastening the plateau and inevitable downtrend of PLEX price ingame.
Its in CCPs interest to prolong the period before it plateaus for as long as possible, inorder to encourage PLEX purchase in a bullish market. Once the price reaches its terminal, absolute sustainable upper reach, it will result in a cascade of PLEX stockpile sales ingame, thus directly reducing CCPs out of game PLEX and sub sales. -
The higher PLEX rises, the more it prices players (especially new ones) out of using PLEX services, thus reducing capacity to purchase PLEX on their part, thus narrowing demand for PLEX to a specific small market segment of isk rich players. The ingame rich will continue to buy PLEX ingame for as long as their isk lasts, but they are only a small fraction of the client base.
-
Increasing PLEX price invariably reduces PCU. The current PCU is a result of rich players buying up the slack (especially for SP farm alts), whilst poor players are simply remaining in extended/permanent Alpha, and likely dropping out of the game eventually. The PCU numbers are not what they seem, nor what they are presented as by some heavily PLEX invested parties. The very recent introduction of Alphas is what is, for now, floating PCU numbers. Very few of them as new players, however, have the means to participate in the PLEX market.
TLDR: The isk/PLEX rich are the ones primarily benefiting from this continually accelerating increase in PLEX price. Even though a higher PLEX price is motivating more PLEX purchase from CCP, that introduced PLEX is in substantial proportions being bought up ingame by isk rich players, not by the isk poor.
Interesting, are you able to back any of this up with data or trends ? In particular I’m not convinced by
Why is a downtrend inevitable? Personally I am more convinced it will only ever rise as isk generation must always be positive and the supply of PLEX increasingly falls.
Why is this an issue? And the services are still fully available if people are willing to pay for them. Again I would argue its just the market adjusting to a fair price given the supply and demand of isk and PLEX. The only argument I could accept is isk distribution isn’t exactly “fair” but again in my opinion its better than it ever has been due to all the buffs to wealth generation (mining buffs, ratting buffs, incursions, fw lp, moon goo re-distribution etc).
Again I just don’t believe this is true, I’ve yet to have any friends leave over PLEX price. I would ask for data but I think it will be nearly impossible to get any high quality non-biased data outside of CCP. I say this as any data we have is likely to be biased as I do believe an increase in PLEX price will lead to a reduction of ALTs which is not the same as actual people leaving the game.
Again I strongly believe that if the PLEX price gets too high the main result will just be less people buying and more people selling or buying subscription time. I know that I’m certainly now considering purchasing subscription time again as I don’t think the 100mil a day for 2 accounts is worth the grinding time. But I don’t think this is an issue I think its just the market reaching a fair price.
The price cannot rise indefinitely.
There is an upper tolerance, but what that is is anyones guess.
Once the plateau is reached, player stockpiled PLEX will begin to flood the market as holders try to get the best price for their stock possible, resulting in a snowballing downward trend that is detrimental to CCPs sub/PLEX sales.
The issue of players being priced out of the ingame PLEX market for isk, is that it narrows the PLEX market to the isk-rich. Not only does this hasten the plateau I mentioned above, but it also, on a perso al player level, means poor players may lose interest in the game, as clients, because they dont feel they cant afford PLEX services for isk.
As I said in my previous post, PCU is currently, temporarily, being floated by Alphas as free as a new phenomenon profoundly different to the previous trial/sub model.
Alphas, however, nominally earn no income for CCP, compared to Omegas.
This is accurate, but what you need to consider, is different client segments.
Who are the ones that will be buying subs?
Furthermore, as I outlined above, when the price of PLEX ingame finally plateaus and starts dropping, CCPs sub/PLEX revenue will decrease inline, as PLEX is dumped onto the market and used to buy gametime by others, and thus also reducing the demand for a subbing with cash.
ccp has done a fine job paying crappy salries to the devs and keeping the server running, the company is about about 1/3 the size as it was back than before plex existed, subs should be paying the bills since we have so many “active subs” according to ccp than plex is pur profit for their failures and pimp cups.
No you are just not smart enough to understand the difference.
Look, the obvious case to start with is a monopolist. The monopolist facing the following profit function who maximizes profits will do the following:
max p*p(q) - c(q).
Where:
- p is the price
- p(q) is the demand functin
- c(q) is the cost function
- q is the quantity.
Let p(q) = 100 - q
Further, define c(q) = 10q.
Now we have max
q*(100 - q) - 10q
by selecting q.
The first order conditin for this is,
100 - 2q - 10 = 0, or
2q = 90, or
q = 45.
Based on this level of output the price is thus 55.
The second order conditions are meet since this is a downwards opening parabola–i.e. the profit function is a strictly concave function.
Profits are determined by 5545 - 1045 = 2,205. Suppose output is 44 and price is 56, now profits are 2,024, less than an output of 45. Suppose output is 46 and price is 54, then profits are also 2,024.
Now suppose we want to maximize price. The demand function rewritten in terms of price is given by:
p = 100 - q.
To get the price as high as possible we’d set q = 0 and price = 100. Of course p*q = 0. So to actually generate some revenues we’d set q =1. Now the price is 99. But the profits in this case are 99 -10 or 89. Much, much less than the profit maximizing solution.
In fact the profit function looks like this:
Clearly, the peak is at 45. Maximizing profits for this monopolist is to select a level of output that leads to a price of 55 which is less than the maximal price (with non-zero output) of 99.
Really, what if the existing client demands all of your revenue to remain an existing client? This is clearly a dumb criterion.
Aahahahahaha…whatever you say.
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I’m finding it hard to visualise the Plex price peaking and then falling to rock bottom.
The only reason this would happen is if lots of people joined or the way in which Plex is presented is changed.
Provided CCP use their profit to expand/enhance the game and market it well their earnings will be secure.
I speculate prices should stay at around their current isk price as it is accurate to what services Plex has.
I think only a select few use Plex for game time only, these people would typically live in sov or wh and have the freedom to play for 4 or 5 hours per day.
There will always be a desire to play eve, it’s almost like eve can sustain itself. Right now I’m craving mining in my covert prospect or seeing if I can find an officer spawn belt ratting. I’m hooked on eve its my drug.
The argument presented by Salvos Rhoska is that there is a mass of people hoarding PLEX and that when the price plateaus they will all dump on the market causing the market to crash. However it is a ridiculous argument as it completely ignores all concepts of supply, demand and the markets ability to respond.
If 500 PLEX was to drop in price to <300mil the first thing I would do is liquidate all my assets and buy as much as possible and have 5+ accounts subbed for the next 10 years, just as many other people would, ergo the demand has increased; therefore the market has responded to the new lower price by increasing demand and adjustment to a new fair price will occur. Likewise people that were buying and selling PLEX will stop thus supply has been cut again causing the plex price to rise.
Again in my personal opinion unless for some reason we get a HUGE splurge of new people joining the game I can only ever see PLEX prices increasing as CCP adds more PLEX services and PLEX supply dwindles. There will of course by variation in price due to speculation and people investing.
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We dont have figures on how many individuals are buying PLEX for cash, what demographic ingame they are, nor the rate of increase/decrease of those purchases.
I am not as optimistic as others, that that pool of cash purchasers has grown in proportion to rise in ISK price, nor the consolidation of all servces into PLEX, and the subsequent addition of further PLEX services.
I, for one, have not been enticed into buying PLEX from CCP. Have you?
Has anyone here bought PLEX, or more of it, as a result of these changes?
If so, how many?
If not, why not?
Does buying Skill Extractors (praise Omir Sarikusa!) With money and buying plexlettes with the isk made from said extractors count?