A Quick Look At EVE Online's Global PLEX Market- Catalyst Launch Day Edition

Okay, I didn't begin the new mining epic arc in EVE Online yesterday. In my defense Kisogo is a very long way from where I usually play and when I logged out I was sitting in the agent's station in my Mastodon. So instead of a mining update I thought I'd take a look at PLEX prices on the global PLEX market.

From the start of the market to the launch of Catalyst

For everyone complaining about the price of PLEX being too damn high ... well, it's still high. But since the developers implemented the global PLEX market in early July the average price of PLEX has decreased from 6 million ISK down to 5 million ISK. 

For those PLEXing their accounts, that's a savings of 500 million ISK per month. Of course, with the launch of an expansion comes expansion sales. In the case of Catalyst the following sale is occurring for game time in the New Eden Store running from 14-24 November.

• 1 month - 400 PLEX (down from 500 PLEX)
• 3 months - 1020 PLEX (down from 1200 PLEX)
• 6 months - 1890 PLEX (down from 2100 PLEX)

I'll just mention the sale for people with a little bit more money to spend than myself. Also until the 24th the cash shop lowered the price of 20,000 PLEX from $650 down to $458. I think that comes out to be $7.25/month for a little over 5 years if all the PLEX is spent on game time. Utterly insane.

The sales and expansion are having an effect. Up until a week ago the volume of PLEX sold on the market never exceeded 1.8 million PLEX. But over the last 8 days (week before the expansion plus launch day) the volume has exceeded that mark 6 times, with three of those days seeing over 2 million PLEX sold.

From the start of the market to the launch of Catalyst

How does that affect the real world value of ISK? Let's just say the South Korean won is not the only currency that has recently strengthened against the U.S. dollar. When the global PLEX market opened 1 billion ISK was worth $7.49. After the first day of Catalyst, the value had increased to $8.99, an increase of 20%. Of course, with a lot of the sales ongoing players purchasing PLEX today to convert to ISK aren't paying $8.99/billion ISK. But once all the sales end in 5 days I'll be interested to see if the price stays at that level.