Every day now for the past month I’ve heard at least one person complaining, “Why is PLEX so expensive now?” There are a multitude of reasons why this may be and anyone can speculate, but the fact remains that PLEX on the open market has gone up in price drastically.
For those of you who don’t know what PLEX is, here is a brief explanation. PLEX stands for Pilot License Extension and is an item that can be bought within EVE Online to add 30 days of game time to your account. It can be converted from any game time code or can be purchased with real money (usually around $15 USD each unless on sale). Once a PLEX is redeemed, it appears as an in-game item which pilots can trade on the EVE market. More information on PLEX can be found here.
The amount of PLEX on the market at any one time is regulated by CCP itself. It’s a great way to play EVE Online and never have to pay actual money, or rather pay allowing you to spend more effort on other aspects of the game you’d rather. You can literally just sell a PLEX and get hundreds of millions of isk. It’s fast and easy, but lately it’s been getting a little more expensive than some capsuleers are willing to spend. (see below).
As you can see for the last two months of this graph the cost of PLEX in Jita sat around on average between 600 million isk and 660 million isk. The green line shows sales over a twenty day period while the red line shows market sales over a five day period. In case you are wondering why the red line is more expensive it’s because usually players that want the PLEX are willing to pay a premium to have it right then and there. The last ten days of those graph however show a substantial increase to that red line, and as a result you get prices looking something like this screenshot I took today (see below).
It does appear lately prices have been leveling off a little bit as can be seen from the graph above, but nobody can say for certain if this will be the new average for PLEX on the market. As long as players are willing to continue to pay for PLEX on the open in-game market such as Jita you can bet PLEX will continue to stay around its existing cost for at least a little while longer.
