EVE General Discussion

Yeah, that. I can't really see the reason CCP may do it for. Maybe you (Malcanis) can explain?

Are you making a billion an hour? Because i make way more than that an hour with my JOB.
I don't have time to shoot red icons or fiddle with a moon goo trainset empire just to pay my sub.
I pay for the sub, if i need isk i sell a plex and burn it having fun, i log on to have fun.
Remember, a plex is worth about as much as a nice coffee and a couple of bagels for two. If that's a burden for you to raise, stop playing. If that's an achievement in-game, you are wasting your god damned life. People that time rich need better things to do i swear.

oh look 1111 likes, nice.

A plex is what some people can live a week for. There are different countries in the world, keep that in mind.

OK look when you're trying to sell something, there are some things that you can do to increase demand (or, more precisely, to reduce deterrents to demand).

1) You can make other options less accessible, less desirable or less useful.

2) You can improve the granularity of the product. Granularity meaning variation in both the cost and the utility of what you're selling. Lots of people buy a car, but if the smallest amount of car that you could possibly buy was 100 units, car manufacturers would almost certainly sell many fewer cars. Or if the cheapest vehicle was an Aston Martin DB9 or an F350 truck.

3) You can reduce your prices. Of course this is kind of a last resort, because doing so instantly decreases your existing revenue base, but there can be good commercial reasons for doing so that outweigh that consideration - if you're in a position to leverage those reasons.

4) You can increase the intrinsic utility of the product; add options, make it do more, improve it.

So the first option isn't really available to CCP: there's no easy avenue to making competing products less attractive than buying EVE PLEX; either people want to put their £$ isn't EVE or they want to put it into some other hobby. Except that there is one avenue, and that's getting customers to buy PLEX instead of spending their EVE money in other ways.

The second option is absolutely available to CCP, because they've already implemented it. The Aurum, EVE's third cash equivalent currency is over 4 years old and has more uses than PLEX already. It's also available in smaller value-quantities, so it's more granular, But it's still not granular and convenient enough to qualify as an easy impulse purchase. Currently, PLEX are expensive, have poor granulation (You have to spend at least $17.50, you can't get less than 30 days at a time), are kind of hard work to buy, and are risky and vulnerable when instantiaed into the game.

(And yes, I said "third". PLEX is only the second. The first is, of course, game time. See below!)

The third option is equally available to CCP, and while it may seem paradoxical to advise a business with falling customer sales to reduce revenue, I believe CCP needs to urgently consider doing so. This is because EVE players mainly play EVE because other EVE players do so. The more people who are actively playing, the better value proposition it is to "invest" your hobby time in the game; more groups to join, more content to enjoy, more events to read about, more depth to the game experience.

Oh hey, we just covered the fourth option already!

The tl;dr, as the more perceptive readers will have already guessed is that I believe that CCP should make the following changes:

i: Unify all 3 of EVE cash-equivalent currencies into a single currency: Aurum. The only way to give CCP money is to buy Aurum; every cash equivalent service is transacted in Aurum, including game time.

ii: Every day an account is active, Aurum is deducted from your AUR wallet. If you're subscribed then you get x AUR/month or 3x AUR/quarter or whatever added to your AUR wallet. If you never want to use any of the other AUR products, then everything carries on for you pretty much as before, with the exception that you can conveniently see in game how much game time you have left.

iii: AUR can be removed from your wallet and converted into freely tradable AUR tokens again. If you want to "Buy a PLEX and sell it for ISK" then you cash in some of the AUR in your wallet buy this method. If you need more ISk than this will allow, then you'll need to buy some more AUR from CCP. This allows players to extend their available game time in much more granular ways. Instead of being forced to have enough ISK to buy 30 days worth at once, they will have the option to buy whatever AUR their wallet allows when they need it.

iv: CCP significantly reduce the per-diem cash cost of maintaining a subscription. Currently a PLEX costs £17.50, while a subscription costs £9.99 for 30 days, or £28 for 90 days. That's a gigantic markup, and it's unjustifiable.

Bring the equivalent AUR price down to something just barely above that 30 day subscription level. Say £10-50-£10.99 or $16 for enough AUR to play for 30 days, and more importantly, allow people to buy small quantities, down to around the £2/$3 zone. At this price point, people can buy AUR as an impluse purchase, because what the hell, it's only £2, and once you're tapping that impulse "don't care about the cost" market, your demand will invariably rise.

To be absolutely blunt: if your weekly salary is the same value as paying for a subscription, there are MUCH more important things in your life that you should be focusing on than playing a spaceship video game.

I've already solved mine. Moved out of ukraine and am happy about it. And don't have that much issues about money received vs money absolutely necessary to survive. But I'm one, and there are still people out there.

They can afford a PC, elecricity and internet though, so I hardly think starving kids in Africa are being priced out of EVE because they can't play for free.

Who are you and what have you done with the FHC Malcanis???

Fair point.

Keeping a sub separate from any game currency transaction ought to work as long as a sub is always the cheapest way to pay for your gametime.

Say a sub costs USD 15.00 per month. Paying to play via AUR should cost USD 20.00.

That suggests (to me at least) that there needs to me a RL cash value floor for the "new AUR" and fixed AUR<>game time exchange rate to ensure this remains the case.

To be worthwhile (especially factoring in likely transaction processing costs) there will need to be a "minimum" bundle of AUR that can be purchased, say 2 weeks' worth (USD 10.00). My pub won't put my card through for less than a tenner, so why should EVE be any different...

Your idea seems fundamentally sound. Improve the granularity of the offering while simplifying things a bit. Improve flexibility and utility. Ought to make things better for both the "sellers" and the "consumers" in this case.

Currently, you get bonus AUR if you purchase a lot. Looks quite similar to discounts we see on plex/subs. I'd leave that as is.