I have recently started a SaaS company and I noticed that eve online doesn’t seem to have much support for hosting the 3rd party tools that the community has created.
I had a look at the EULA and I came across this.
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You may not market, sell, advertise, promote, solicit or otherwise arrange for the exchange or transfer of items in the game or other game services unless it is for in-game sales of in-game services or items.
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The advertisement or sale of out of game goods and services not directly related to EVE Online is prohibited. The only out of game goods and services which can be advertised or sold for in-game currency or assets are the following: EVE forum signature creation, EVE related websites, EVE related artwork, third party voice communication server hosting, or EVE Time Codes.
What I take away from this is essentially the developers saying, “yes you can charge our users for 3rd party services, but they pay with our money”.
I think this is quite ridiculous even for eve and I am surprised there is not more outcry that this is still the case. I mean they could have at least separated the rules in the EULA so it wasn’t so easy to see what they are trying to achieve.
Additionally what and where do the repercussions land? If a SaaS company decided to start offering 3rd party services to the players for real money what would happen? Do the users that paid for the service get banned?
Following this logic surely anyone who has paid discord real money for servers to deal with corp/alliance organisational tasks should be banned?
In the case that the repercussions land on the SaaS provider with some kind of legal action I don’t think CCP has a leg to stand on. All of the 3rd party tools are open source and have their own licence agreements that CCP has no say over.
Essentially what this comes down to is cheaper and more readily available services for the community. I saw a post advertising pathfinder for 175 plex/mo. This works out to around £5/mo. I know for a fact you can run this service for £1/mo, when you factor in costs that a SAsS might put on top you’d be looking at 2.50/mo Max. Half the price currently offered to the player base. This only scales further with the other services I have seen offered on these forums for Plex.
I want to make it clear, I am not blaming the service providers, but when you are providing a real world service for in game currency it is only natural to overcharge (in this case 5x). Essentially service providers are just getting a very nice discount on their plex (in the case that they aren’t selling it for real world money… Which is hilarious because that is what is happening here anyway).
My point with this post is to gain some clarity with regards to the rules and hopefully shed some light on the absurdity of the rules around 3rd party services.
Thanks,
Woody