How much an average EVE player makes? This is a question that we don't have direct data for. All results are anecdotal (mine included). This question is important to answer to plan our own place in the EVE economy.
The one solid point we have is PLEX. It's sold around 480M on the EVE market and you can buy it in the item shop for about $15. About 100K PLEX sold a month and there are about 400K accounts, so its a pretty high volume item to have an equilibrium price. We can assume that one buys PLEX for real money if he can make more real money an hour than by grinding in EVE.
Players use to say that "I easily make $15 an hour so for me it's much better than even the best station trading". However they make a mistake here. Most people in the World don't make $15 an hour. Before you'd answer "who cares" or go into some thinking about the average salary of an average EVE player, let me tell you that it's totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much an American phone tech support operator wants to earn, as the phone tech support is outsourced to India exactly for the lower salaries. The transportable products are generated at the countries where the salaries are lowest. So if ISK farming is profitable for a Russian, he simply make wannabe American ISK farmers unemployed.
There are lot of Eastern Europeans and Russians in the game. In these countries game costs are significant factor. Lot of players play on hacked WoW servers because they can't afford a WoW subscription. Now if there is an MMO which can be played fully for free (not a "you can log in for free but must pay $ for every useful item"), it would be clearly popular among the often unemployed or simply poor young adults, income-less children, adult unemployed, housewives, disabled people, pensioners and so on.
The minimal wage in these countries is around $4000/year. If we assume 40 hours/week, 48 workweeks a year, we get $2/hour. This is the salary you can get an employee to do hard labor in Eastern Europe. Students work for less in the summer, especially if we consider taxes.
So a PLEX is $15. 1 hour work worth $2, so earning 1 PLEX is 7.5 hours. 1 PLEX is about 0.48B, so the average income of a person is below 60M/hour.
Where can be mistakes in this calculation? One obvious is that generating ISK in EVE can be a fun activity, so people do it even if it's not profitable. But wait, such players are ready to "work" for less than 60M/hour. One can claim that EVE PvE (that makes the ISK) is so bad that people rather pay real money to skip it, or those who can't afford to pay it simply don't play EVE. The fact that vast majority of the EVE players are in highsec (where PvP is very limited) disproves that.
One can assume that for cultural reasons Eastern Europeans and Russians don't really play EVE, so the few of them simply can't generate enough ISK, so the Western players are not outplaced from ISK farming. So 200M/hour is the average which is around the US minimal wage. However if it would be true, the few playing Russians would be extremely rich (in terms of ISK) as their farming activity would be richly rewarded. So Russian alliances would be the supercap monsters, but actually the mostly American CFC-HB has the supercap power. Also, if you could get about $4-6 by playing EVE an hour, RMT would be all over the place and illicit ISK sellers. The main reason of limited RMT in EVE is that non-bot ISK farming is unprofitable, even if we consider Eastern European, Indian or Chinese workforce. The truth is the ISK farming is so unprofitable as real world work that no man (only bots) do that.
We are out of counter-arguments and have to face that the income of an average player is pretty low, probably around 40M/hour. This allow people with lot of $ to amass relatively large ingame wealth by converting PLEX as their real life earning power is much-much higher than their ingame.
Tuesday morning report: 141.1B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
The one solid point we have is PLEX. It's sold around 480M on the EVE market and you can buy it in the item shop for about $15. About 100K PLEX sold a month and there are about 400K accounts, so its a pretty high volume item to have an equilibrium price. We can assume that one buys PLEX for real money if he can make more real money an hour than by grinding in EVE.
Players use to say that "I easily make $15 an hour so for me it's much better than even the best station trading". However they make a mistake here. Most people in the World don't make $15 an hour. Before you'd answer "who cares" or go into some thinking about the average salary of an average EVE player, let me tell you that it's totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much an American phone tech support operator wants to earn, as the phone tech support is outsourced to India exactly for the lower salaries. The transportable products are generated at the countries where the salaries are lowest. So if ISK farming is profitable for a Russian, he simply make wannabe American ISK farmers unemployed.
There are lot of Eastern Europeans and Russians in the game. In these countries game costs are significant factor. Lot of players play on hacked WoW servers because they can't afford a WoW subscription. Now if there is an MMO which can be played fully for free (not a "you can log in for free but must pay $ for every useful item"), it would be clearly popular among the often unemployed or simply poor young adults, income-less children, adult unemployed, housewives, disabled people, pensioners and so on.
The minimal wage in these countries is around $4000/year. If we assume 40 hours/week, 48 workweeks a year, we get $2/hour. This is the salary you can get an employee to do hard labor in Eastern Europe. Students work for less in the summer, especially if we consider taxes.
So a PLEX is $15. 1 hour work worth $2, so earning 1 PLEX is 7.5 hours. 1 PLEX is about 0.48B, so the average income of a person is below 60M/hour.
Where can be mistakes in this calculation? One obvious is that generating ISK in EVE can be a fun activity, so people do it even if it's not profitable. But wait, such players are ready to "work" for less than 60M/hour. One can claim that EVE PvE (that makes the ISK) is so bad that people rather pay real money to skip it, or those who can't afford to pay it simply don't play EVE. The fact that vast majority of the EVE players are in highsec (where PvP is very limited) disproves that.
One can assume that for cultural reasons Eastern Europeans and Russians don't really play EVE, so the few of them simply can't generate enough ISK, so the Western players are not outplaced from ISK farming. So 200M/hour is the average which is around the US minimal wage. However if it would be true, the few playing Russians would be extremely rich (in terms of ISK) as their farming activity would be richly rewarded. So Russian alliances would be the supercap monsters, but actually the mostly American CFC-HB has the supercap power. Also, if you could get about $4-6 by playing EVE an hour, RMT would be all over the place and illicit ISK sellers. The main reason of limited RMT in EVE is that non-bot ISK farming is unprofitable, even if we consider Eastern European, Indian or Chinese workforce. The truth is the ISK farming is so unprofitable as real world work that no man (only bots) do that.
We are out of counter-arguments and have to face that the income of an average player is pretty low, probably around 40M/hour. This allow people with lot of $ to amass relatively large ingame wealth by converting PLEX as their real life earning power is much-much higher than their ingame.
Tuesday morning report: 141.1B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
0 comments:
Post a Comment