The Latest RMT Kerfuffle In EVE Online: The Prospector Pack

Once CCP announced the Prospector's Path, I knew anything I wrote would upset a fair number of people. Within the announcement was a link to a new cash shop package called Prospector Pack. The package includes 30 days of game time, 100 PLEX, and a "ready to fly Retriever". The following description of the ship made people lose their minds.

A Retriever mining barge with everything you need to fly it including skill books, modules, and tokens to redeem for Skill Points and ship insurance.

After watching HateLesS_Gaming's review of the pack, I think CCP at a minimum should be mocked mercilessly for thinking a good fit for a mining barge includes fitting both an ice harvester and a strip miner in the high slots. But community sentiment ran a little deeper.

On Wednesday, CSM member Brisc Rubal posted an open letter from the CSM on both the official EVE Online forums and the EVE Online sub-Reddit. I will quote a long portion of an extremely long letter to present the main complaint:

One issue that has been a perennial player concern is that of monetization. As EVE transitioned from a subscription-based game to free-to-play, and with the introduction of cosmetics and skill extractors, players have focused heavily on how CCP monetizes EVE. From the 2011 “Summer of Rage” to the monthly complaints from players over different ads and new monetization schemes, no one can argue that the core player base in EVE Online cares deeply about monetization and is highly skeptical about the direction CCP monetization has been going. Core players have deeply held fears that there is a slippery slope at play when it comes to EVE monetization, and what was treated before as something that CCP should never do (for example, directly selling skill points to players) is eventually accepted. The CSM and CCP have had a constant stream of communication on these issues over the years. As a group of current and former CSM members, many having served on multiple CSMs so far, we can say from personal experience that every single one has seen in-depth, constant discussions between the CSM and CCP on these issues, and we’ve brought them up with every single person in senior leadership from the CEO on down.

The one line we have always said should never be crossed is the selling of fitted ships. This has been consistent. It has been long-held, and passionately held, by most core players. None of us have talked with any of our fellow CSM members who believed that selling fitted ships was an acceptable means of monetizing the game. Any sale like this would have a negative impact on the in-game economy, for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because it would both set the in-game price for ships (as a function of the real-life cost of the sale, as we see with SKINs) and because it would edge out producers by introducing “free” ships that did not require in-game time and materials to produce.

What led me to writing and discarding a couple versions of this post is determining how many people I want to upset. Unlike Brisc, I am not a trained lawyer who lobbies the Congress of the United States for a living. I don't like using politically correct terminology like Brisc used in his letter. I have written about real money trading in EVE Online for over a decade, and that is the angle I will approach the latest kerfluffle. So put on your sunglasses and bow ties, I'm about to go down the "monetization" rabbit hole Gangnam style.

The term "monetization" is a polite word used to describe when the publishers of video games engage in the practice of real money trading. Since search engines like Yahoo! (#1), Google (#2), and DuckDuckGo (#2) list me as some sort of expert on RMT, I will list the definition I came up with in 2013.

I'm #1 on Yahoo! search results

So what is RMT?  At the most basic level, real money trading is the exchange of virtual goods, including in-game currency, and services for money's worth. Early pioneers in the economics of video games divided real money trading into two markets: primary and secondary. The secondary markets involved those breaking the terms of services of games by selling in-game items and currency for real world value. Primary markets are endorsed by the game publisher. As I wrote back in 2013:

Where players come to disagreements on RMT are on those activities that fall in the primary RMT market. The HIIT's Tuukka Lehtiniemi in 2007 defined the primary market as trade "in which the operators of certain services sell virtual items to users for real money. Such services are usually free to use. Typically players buy the service’s own internal currency with real money, and use that currency for microtransactions inside the service." Services like this include the cash shops that often appear in games today. Sony Online Entertainment's Station Cash and ArenaNet's Gem Store for Guild Wars 2 are two obvious examples of game operators becoming directly involved in selling in-game items. A growing model is the PLEX-model, in which game companies sell items that players can either redeem for game time or sell to others on the in-game market in exchange for in-game currency.

Since 2013, I have replaced "real world currency" with the phrase "money's worth". Governmental bodies such as the United Kingdom's Gambling Commission are prosecuting people based on the concept that people who play video games can derive more than cash as value from a game. The term is interpreted very broadly and simply means something which has a financial value to the player. The UKGC laid out three criteria for determining if the prize or winnings of a game is considered money's worth:

• Can they be converted to money via third parties?
• Are they tradeable with others to obtain goods or services?
• Can they be used as virtual currencies to pay for goods or services?

If the answer to one or more is yes, then the prizes or winnings is money's worth. For example, games like Axie Infinity that allow players to extract NFTs from the game to sell are engaged in a form of primary market RMT.

EVE players do not consider all primary RMT activity CCP engages in negatively. A popular action is the periodic PLEX for Good campaigns the Icelandic studio conducts when humanitarian disasters occur. Since 2005, the PLEX for Good campaigns have raised over $700,000 for various relief efforts around the world.

In general, EVE players approve of the PLEX system, the biggest driver of activity on EVE's primary RMT market. Introduced in November 2008, the Pilot's License Extensions allowed players to purchase ISK for real world currency to use to purchase ships, ammo, skill books, etc. Players would purchase a PLEX, sell it to someone else for ISK, and the ISK seller could then pay for another month of game time. The ISK buyer is happy, the ISK seller is happy, and CCP is happy because they were able to charge someone more than $14.99 for one month of game time. Everyone won.

CCP expanded the PLEX system in May 2017, changing PLEX into the currency used in the EVE Online cash shop. The move expanded the amount items and services players can purchase using currency earned by playing the game. I believe the interest in adapting play-to-earn features to EVE heard from analysts on the Pearl Abyss quarterly earnings calls is due to the existing PLEX system. How much development is needed to add NFTs to the New Eden Exchange?

How successful is the PLEX system? The answer is found in The Forge, home to EVE's largest market hub. Over 70% of PLEX exchanges between players on the market occurred in the region. In 2021, players spent 1.176 quadrillion ISK to purchase PLEX in The Forge. An amount so large is incomprehensible, so let's break it down. The average amount traded per day equaled 3.2 trillion ISK.

How much is 3.2 trillion/day? Let's put the amount into context. In 2021, I tracked 15.7 trillion ISK in sales at the real money trading site Player Auctions. In other words, 5 days of sales matched what was sold at a very large secondary market RMT site for an entire year. Looking at recent war activity, the Battle of M2-XFE in February 2021 where 257 titans died resulted in 29.1 trillion ISK lost. In other words, the ISK value of PLEX sold in The Forge would have paid for the losses for both sides in that battle in 9 days.

A more understandable way to picture the size of the primary RMT market involving PLEX is converting the ISK to the U.S. dollar. Doing that conversion, the value of the ISK traded for PLEX in The Forge in 2021 was $16.8 million. Since close to 30% of PLEX is traded outside The Forge, that puts the figure for the entire game to over $20 million. To put those numbers into perspective, using the South Korean won to U.S. dollar exchange rate at the end of 2021, EVE Online and EVE Echoes combined for $61.2 million in revenue. CCP most likely didn't sell $20 million in PLEX in 2021, that is just the value of the market.

With so much real life money spent by players on ships, skill books and skill points, implants, etc, what is the big deal about selling a mining barge? Especially since CCP has sold fitted ships in the past.

Doing some research revealed eight starter packs sold from 2013-2015 with ships with all the fittings. I even found a YouTube promotional video for the packs with exploration frigates.

The packs I found were:

• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Amarr Explorer (Magnate)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Asteroid Miner (Venture)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Caldari Bounty Hunter (Condor)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Caldari Explorer (Heron)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Gallente Explorer (Imicus)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Minmatar Arms Dealer (Rifter)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Minmatar Explorer (Probe)
• EVE Online: Starter Pack – Plasma Planet Command (Epithal)

The big difference between the packs sold years ago and the one introduced last week was the ships back in 2013-2016 were only available on either freshly created accounts or trial accounts a player was converting into a subscribing account. Theoretically, a player could decide to purchase the Prospector Pack every month for the 30 days game time, 100 PLEX, and a new Retriever, ship insurance, and possibly an indeterminate amount of skill points. I'm not sure who the tokens used to redeem skill points works.

I should also point out that CCP already sold "fully-fitted ships" before the Prospector Pack arrived in the cash shop last week. The company currently sells the four racial frigates with fittings in the following Expert System packages:

• Amarr Explorer Pack
• Caldari Explorer Pack
• Gallente Explorer Pack
• Minmatar Explorer Pack

These packs, selling for $2.49, did not raise any concerns before now. As far as I know, they still don't.

Do players need to worry about a slippery slope? Brisc in his letter thinks so.

We cannot, in good faith, tell any player concerned with this sale that this is as far as the line goes, because we have seen, twice now, CCP willingly cross a line that we were confident was strictly off-limits. The concerns that players have that CCP will begin selling cruiser, battleship, carrier, dread and even supercarrier and titan fitted ships for cash - concerns some of us would have said were unfounded just yesterday - are legitimate now, and should be listened to.

Beginning in February 2016, another big source of income for CCP involved the sale of skill points. Whatever the pros and cons of the decision from a design perspective, I thought the implementation was horrendous and about as blatant of a money grab as one would ever find in gaming. Here is the list of items required for a character designed to sit in a skill point farm for 1 month.

• 30 days of game time (500 PLEX).
• 2 Multi-Pilot Training Certificates (485 PLEX each)
• 9-12 skill extractors (140 PLEX each)

Now multiply by 100 and that is how much PLEX people needed to purchase from CCP for a skill point farmer to run a 100 character farm. Add in that players often purchased ISK to buy the skill injectors off the market (which is additional PLEX sold) and pretty soon one can see CCP was raking in a lot of cash off their primary market operation.

In order to sell the idea of skill point sales to the player base, CCP published a dev blog in January 2016 making the following statement:

"It’s very important to note here that this means all the skill points available to buy on the market in EVE will have originated on other characters where they were trained at the normal rate.  Player driven economies are key to EVE design and we want you to decide the value of traded skillpoints while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training." [emphasis in the original]

The statement remained true until June 2019. At that point, players noticed a starter pack that included 1 million skill points. We know the pack was aimed at new players due to the inclusion of an item only usable on accounts younger than 35 days. However, 1 million skill points for $4.99 was a steal.

The timing of the introduction of the starter pack was interesting, coming 8 months after the sale of CCP to Pearl Abyss and 3 weeks ahead of the financially disastrous Blackout. At the time, the inclusion of the 1 million skill points in the package was explained as a simple mistake. Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and 7 of the 10 packs in the cash shop contain skill points.

At this point, I normally would conclude my post, passing judgement on the subject. But in the long run, what I think just doesn't matter. Something said on the Q4 2021 earnings call about how the EVE IP will raise more revenue now makes more sense.

In the case of EVE, we will strengthen service in China through holding Fanfest with Chinese users and through other ways. In addition, we are preparing for new types of service through taking into consideration the changed preference of users and the diverse ecosystem changes. [emphasis mine]

Now, we know that one of the changes designed to bring in additional revenue in EVE Echoes occurred in February with the ability to purchase ship insurance with PLEX. That's right, mobile game players can recover expensive ships they lost by spending a little real life money. If players in EVE Echoes can replace lost ships by swiping their credit cards, why not allow EVE Online players to purchase fitted ships the same way? Two weeks ago, I would have considered the thought absurd. Now? I don't see why CCP wouldn't inch their way into making the practice accepted. 

Looking at Pearl Abyss' revenue going back to 2019, I see cause for desperation coming from the offices in Anyang. Since 2019, game revenue from Pearl Abyss' two major intellectual properties has fallen 32.8%, from ₩539.5 billion in 2019 down to ₩362.8 billion in 2021. Crimson Desert, the company's next big game, was supposed to release in the Winter of 2021 but still has no release date. For now, the South Korean game maker is relying on the launch of Black Desert Mobile in China sometime in Q2 and a mobile game based on the Black Clover IP in the second half of 2022 to boost revenue. Anyone who thinks our overlords in Anyang are not encouraging CCP to squeeze every penny possible out of EVE Online has probably borrowed a tankful of copium from a World of Warcraft player.

Honestly, this article took a much darker turn than I originally imagined. I want the services hinted at to investors in South Korea proclaimed to the world at Fanfest. Services that the player base will love. Services that don't include selling ships in the EVE Online cash shop. Hopefully in the run-up to Fanfest in May CCP will start dropping information showing I'm completely wrong. But I have my doubts. I really, really do.