It might even crash hard, maybe even comparable to the real life gold crash of 1980.
The pundits keep telling me I'm wrong, the price of PLEX will always go up, any downswings are temporary and caused by the latest PLEX sale.
Yet I continue to see indications PLEX prices are on the way down.
The screenshot above shows the history graph of PLEX prices for the last 6 months on the Jita market. It's obvious the price has plateaued and dropped somewhat since early July. There have been a few price rallies but each rally has soon been followed by another drop. The price keeps going down.
I've also noticed particular orders that seemed to be there strictly for the purpose of price manipulation (keeping the buy price high that is) have been slowly disappearing. If they ever all disappear, particularly on Jita and the other main hubs, the price of PLEX will start dropping faster.
As an example, here are my PLEX purchases over a 6 hour period last night.
Both buy orders were completely filled (one for 6, the other for 5). I just wish I'd made them larger, particularly the one at 704 mil.
As far as I can tell someone big who was manipulating the price of PLEX to keep it high seems to be dropping out of that game. My guess is that someone is Somer.
Sure someone else could and very well might step up and start doing the same thing. The question is, is there anyone else with a big enough vested interest in keeping the price of PLEX high to sink trillions of ISK into doing it for little or no profit?
Somer undoubtedly had plenty of reason to keep the price high, *even if doing so cost them ISK. In fact the scheme that got them shut down in the end proved beyond a doubt they were perfectly willing to do that.
But who else has both the resources and the motivation to do the same?
Nobody I can think of, except maybe some of the largest corporations and alliances with huge memberships and PLEX sales affiliate links of their own. But I don't think any of them could generate anywhere near the number of affiliate link clicks and subsequent volume of PLEX sales that Somer could.
It has nothing to do with manipulation and everything to do with the health of the game.
ReplyDeleteThe demand of PLEX is coming from die-hard EVE hardcore.
The supply of PLEX comes from casual players who leave when EVE is a bit down and come back when it's up.
Crius made magic with highsec numbers, so casuals come back, more PLEX are created, price will decrease. I wouldn't expect crash and don't think that the median price would go below 700M.
I disagree, the PLEX market is far more complex than that. I'm not going to debate it with you though.
DeletePlease don't ask why not. You wouldn't like the answer.
While PLEX prices can go down, they generally will continue on an upward overall trend. Part of the reason for this is that they get put into the game with real money, meaning people pay their $15 for X isk. When the prices go down, people that buy PLEX and sell it in game will think "hey, I'm getting less ISK!" and buy less PLEX. So outside of PLEX sales, the nature of people wanting value for their money will keep the supply at the right level for the prices to go up. Of course there's a lot more to the prices than this alone.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, Serenity shows us that the PLEX price has a lot of scope for growth. I think what we are seeing at the moment is a short term price increase breaking and soon we'll settle back into a steady upward trend. A lot of people bought up heaps of PLEX for the Somer thing, since people who bought GTC though Somer over the last year or so will have had plex credits, and many of those were stopped before their contracts could be completed, that will have contributed to the recent rise and fall.
I agree with the idea that PLEX is a bubble, but that does not mean what you think. See here: PLEX is money. PLEX store value, that is, they are used as money. Money is the bubble that does not pop.
ReplyDeleteThe only competition for PLEX to be money is ISK, and ISK are created in massive amounts by the efforts of players ratting. I see no indication that EVE's ISK-faucets have been dialed back. Sinks may have increased with Crius industry, but that also remains to be seen. My guess is that industry costs have increased from a non-zero but negligible sink to an insignificant sink. I don't think this will halt the movement to PLEX as a store of value.