Price of Plex

Over on the mittani, there's a new article up regarding the price of Plex and it's rapid increase. The author did an adequate job of explaining the issues but failed on a couple fundamental points in identifying the root cause. EVE's economy functions just like any other economy. Consumer will try to maximize something ("fun" in this case) and will seek ways to do that. There are a number of side objectives that go into that (minimizing costs... both in game and real life for example) but the fundamental equation is one of "fun" maximization. The in game currency (ISK) will get spent efficiently to maximize said "fun". And here's where the recent economy changes come in. Faction Warfare has brought in vast swaths of loot over the past few months. While it is not an ISK faucet (in fact, it's a minor sink), per se, it is a material faucet and those materials are valuable. Additionally, with the end of Hulkageddon, mining (both ore and ice) has been helped dramatically. This is also a minor ISK sink for the broad economy as people who would otherwise be ratting / missioning (and thus collecting bounties / mission rewards) are now mining. But, again, it brings in vast quantities of minerals that have value.

Implants and Plex are two pretty good examples of luxury goods. Neither is required to play the game. While the Implants at a certain level are HEAVILY incentivized to own, having the highest level ones certainly is not. So if a player has a budget that looks something like this:

900,000,000 isk / month (real world equivalent of revenue)

250,000,000 isk / month in variable costs (real world equivalent of Cost of Goods Sold... I.e. the expenses needed to get that revenue... in this case, ships, ammo, drones, fittings, etc)
650,000,000 isk / month profit

500,000,000 isk / month PLEX
120,000,000 isk / month 1 implant upgrade per month
30,000,000 isk / month 1 skillbook / BPO / random faction frigate to play with per month

If the cost of the implants tics down a bit, the amount they have available to spend on PLEX goes up. These goods are linked in this way (not quite supplementary as that has a precise economics meaning indicating they replace each other).

The economy has, in a very real sense, found a way to work "more efficiently". As a group of 500,000 players, we are getting more implants out of the system than we've ever gotten before. And the reward for doing that is that we have more money to spend on things like Plex.

The comparison isn't perfect but it fits in this situation and addresses what is occuring. Whether it will last will depend largely on what they do with FW in the next update.