Having spent the last five years trying to fix the player economy they broke, one might think that CCP deciding to have a go at PLEX now might not be the for the best in EVE Online.

Two data points you should keep in mind while considering this change:

• PLEX and PLEX related items are a huge part of the game economy
• CCP has not had an economist working on EVE Online for many years

In case anybody mentions the economist consulting for EVE Frontier… well, that is one of those “my T-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my T-shirt” situations.  EVE Frontier is pulling resources from EVE Online, no contributing to the core mechanics or design of the game.

So how big is the PLEX related market?  Here is the May 2025 velocity of ISK chart.

May 2025 – Velocity of ISK

The bottom line, the red line, is the flow of ISK without PLEX related items or contracts.

The upper two lines are the flow of ISK with PLEX and then with PLEX and Contracts.  We don’t know how much of contracts is PLEX related, but it could be a significant amount as it is a way around the market transaction taxes.

So PLEX represents a lot of the New Eden economy… maybe more than half of it.

This is the doing of CCP, which took the original idea of PLEX… a tradeable in-game item… and decided to give it multiple roles back in 2017 by turning it into their cash shop currency.  They fractured it so that one old PLEX was now 500 new PLEX.  500 PLEX would now get you 30 days of Omega subscription, but you had to buy it through the in-game store where your PLEX could buy all sorts of other things.

2009 PLEX would be about 3 billion ISK in Jita today

So what are they even trying to do?

Up until yesterday PLEX was an item that could be listed on the market and, like every other item, was subject to the limitations of the market which limits you to purchases within you current region.  This is often viewed as one of the strengths of the New Eden economy, that you do not have access to a game-wide instant delivery auction house, that regional markets can develop, that arbitrage is possible, that you can setup shop supplying a specific area of space where there is a need.

However, because CCP has turned PLEX into the all purpose in-game currency they are rightly worried about a supply problem.  Despite mentions of provide PLEX as rewards, CCP is loathe to give it away, so the monthly AIR opportunities reward of 5 whole PLEX are unlikely to shift the tide in any measurable way.

So CCP Rattati and team hit upon the idea of making the PLEX market universal, in sort of the way the WoW Token market is universal across retail servers per region.  The buy/sell prices for WoW Tokens are the same on all US servers because Blizz didn’t want dead servers to stop buying their goods.

The changes as outlined by CCP:

• All PLEX buy and sell orders are pooled into a global region, a single virtual location accessible from everywhere; no travelling required.

• Bought PLEX is still delivered to your Vault, no hauling needed, as before.

• Location and standings based listing tax and fees won’t change for now

Now if you go to the market and check on PLEX you see all the PLEX available on the market game wide… which isn’t that much right now because they had to cancel all current orders so people will need to go re-list or redo their buy orders.

PLEX in New Eden July 7, 2025

They did not go full WoW Token where you can only see the current available buy/sell price, but they have now flattened the market for PLEX.

The patch notes indicate that they have some work to do when it comes to private structures.

Global PLEX market prices will be visible in private structures (e.g. citadels and keepstars) across New Eden, but trading from private structures with ACL restrictions will remain the same; you will not be able to buy items from, or sell items to, orders in stations that you cannot access.

So Global PLEX is “global” with some exceptions, indicating that they were more interested in a quick fix.  The whole thing, from announcement, through a whole two days of testing on Sisi, to launch, felt like they were in a hurry to get this done.

What I think this will do:

• Unify the price of PLEX
• Stop arbitrage and any other regional market pricing

You’ll basically pay the market rate where ever you go.  Yay.

What I am pretty sure this won’t do:

• Increase the PLEX supply
• Reduce the price of PLEX
• Stop people from using contracts to sell PLEX to avoid the market taxes
• Stop wild market swings when CCP has a sale on Omega time in the in-game store
• Stop people from investing in PLEX as a hedge against inflation

CCP has ways to deal with the first three, they just won’t because it would involve making PLEX less expensive.  Instead they keep introducing new uses for PLEX, like the SKINR that came in with Equinox, which puts more price pressure on the market.  You don’t need an economist to figure that out… CCP even says that in their dev blog, then jumps to Global PLEX as a solution.

Also, CCP seems pretty agitated in tone about that last one, buying to hold as an investment… again, they are the ones who have made that a sensible move.

All of which has little to do with me.  I just subscribe with real world money and rarely buy PLEX from CCP, opting to buy it off the market if I need any for something in the game… which I rarely ever do.  We’ll see how this goes.  The velocity of ISK chart for July might be an interesting start.

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