Tuesday 11 December 2012

The Entitlement Complex

"NEW NPC AI completely changes complexes. It's almost impossible to run any of them, especially 10/10 or 8/10. Switching targets simply makes it impossible. I personally don't have 3b to get some high specialized marauder. I don't have time and patience to run missions in high sec making 20-30M/hour. I like to shoot and I don't like to do market stuff. My accounts cost 1.2b every month that i need to pay to keep my accounts alive. It was already on the border now, spending most of my free time in weekends running damn complexes so survive another month. But now it's over. I don't see any way how to make ISK anymore!

I will wait one month if CCP realizes they totally ****** it up. After that I don't see any other way than letting my accounts expire and wait what happens.

Very bad job CCP, you really need someone who understands this game from inside ! Thumbs down !"


 The quote above is very representative of what I often see on Eve forums: "Due to such and such change I can no longer PLEX all my accounts, hey CCP, you're losing a customer!"

Do these people realise that they are non-paying customers? CCP spend money on design, coding and infrastructure and get nothing in return from these guys, apart from their interactions with other players. Yes, these are also important in a MMORPG but they don't pay bills.

Looking at the PLEX/GTC price, which has doubled since I started playing in 2008, it seems that either many more people are buying them these days (more likely in my opinion) or fewer people are selling - both bad news for CCP finances.

CLARIFICATION: I know people paying with PLEX have their bill paid in RL money by someone else. What I believe is that the growing PLEX price (ignoring speculative spikes and drops) shows that for every PLEX generator, there are more and more PLEX users appearing. Which, in turn, means that average revenue per user goes down. Of course, only CCP know the breakdown between their variable and fixed costs and can tell whether gross or per-user revenue is more important to them. Again, only CCP know how elastic PLEX supply is with regards to ISK price.

When CCP tried to introduce alternative ways of boosting revenues, players revolted, so it is to be expected that they will at least try to reduce ISK generation.

No one has promised players they will be able to play for free AND spend very little time grinding the required ISK. Nuff said.

5 comments:

  1. Your wrong. People who buy plex off other players are being paid for by others, if they didn't pay isk for it, no one would buy plex's off ccp.

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    1. As PLEX price dynamics show, there are many more people like that today than a few years ago so their departure won't affect CCP's income, PLEX would probably just become somewhat cheaper.

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    2. I've added a clarification on that bit. And thanks for you're comment:p

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  2. Actually, you are incorrect with your numbers. CCP makes MORE revenue per player when players plex their accounts instead of paying a subscription price. When I paid my account with a credit card, I paid 6 months at a time and it averaged a little over 12 dollars a month to play. Two Plex cost 35 dollars which means each plex runs 17.50! CCP makes almost 45% more revenue off me every month now. In some cases when people buy a single plex that runs 20 dollars, CCP makes even more from that plex. Hope that explains it.

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    1. Good point, looks like even with the biggest discounts PLEX are more expensive than long-term pre-payments. However, one needs to take the time value of money into account as well. And to compare the two properly we need to know the average PLEX life time - the time between when it's purchased and when it is used to pay for the game.

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