Skill Point Trading: About That Price Point

As someone who follows real money trading in EVE Online, I always watch both the amount of PLEX sold in The Forge, the home of New Eden's main trade hub, and the price of PLEX. Let me state for the record that I was absolutely stunned last week when I saw that 15,345 PLEX traded hands last Tuesday, the first day of the new skill point trading feature. Mark that date on the calendar, as the record will probably last until the servers shut down. To give some perspective on just how big an effect the feature had on the market, I put together a little chart.

I have sales data for PLEX in The Forge going back to January 2013. In the chart above, we see that the sales dropped for the first two weeks of February in 2015, although that is probably a result of the numbers in 2013 and 2014 benefiting from a large influx of new players drawn to EVE due to news coverage of the battles of Asakai (2013) and B-R5RB (2014). In fact, the 81,044 PLEX sold in the first two weeks of this month is the most PLEX sold in a single month since 87,764 PLEX were sold in December 2014. Let that sink in for a moment. Due to the introduction of skill trading on 9 February, the first two weeks of February 2016 saw more PLEX sold than in any full month in 2015.

The astounding numbers do not end there. The difference in the year-over-year number of PLEX sold between 2015 and 2016 of 44,327 represents an additional 3,643 years of game time traded on the in-game market over a two-week span. I should also add that, as far as I can determine, that this month is the first time that the value of game time traded between players has exceeded 100 trillion ISK, and the month is not even half over.

Hopefully people will not tire of reading about the effect that skill point trading is having on the EVE economy, because I find the topic utterly fascinating. But the early returns are in. CCP appears to have hit the price point of the skill extractors, and thus skill injectors, right on the nose.