Skullduggerous space MMO Eve Online has changed the way its glittering golden subscription token is sold in the hellish hypercapitalist void. The change affects Plex, a shiny type of trade good you can use to re-up your subscription to the game. From now on, the ethereal digigood will be sold on a magical “global” market across the entirety of space, as opposed to being sold locally from region to region.

It’s not an absolutely game-changing economic shake-up, but it may mildly irritate any folks who speculate on Plex as if it were shares in (ew) Microsoft. The change might also make interesting reading for anyone who likes to think about Eve as a petri dish for Earth’s increasingly corposwamped global economy.

Like the laser turrets and afterburners of Eve’s interstellar market, you can sell and buy Plex for big amounts of in-game money. And just like any product, it has sometimes been more expensive to buy on one side of the galaxy, but cheaper on the other side. If you theoretically gathered a few billion ISK (the standard space credit earned by whacking rats or selling dodgy antennae) you could buy a stack of this Plex stuff and pay for your next month’s subscription in real life. Neat. But it might be cheaper to buy in safe territory and more expensive deep in the wilderness.

This change means you’ll now simply buy Plex via a global pool of sellers, which will appear the same anywhere in New Eden, according to developers CCP.

“This friction-free system aims to boost liquidity, enable a fair market equilibrium, and support EVE’s evolving economy,” they say in a post explaining the new market (they also offer the full patch notes).

A fleet of battleships fires multiple lasers in Eve Online
Image credit: CCP

“As stewards of New Eden’s economy, CCP acts as both custodian and regulator, a central bank of sorts,” the post continues. “PLEX plays a foundational role in this system. But over time […] its function has drifted. It’s increasingly treated as a long-term investment or speculative asset, rather than a flexible, fluid currency meant to empower player choice. That dynamic distorts pricing, limits access, and creates artificial scarcity that benefits a few at the expense of many.

“We’re committed to fixing that, without resorting to harsh measures like inventory taxes, price hikes, or product removals. Instead, we’re focused on system-level changes that move us closer to a healthy, fair market equilibrium.”

For those of us not fluent in brokerspeak, CCP may basically be seeking to flatten out the price of their valuable little pretend gold bar across the entirety of pretend space. Plex is special, according to the devs, since it is also sold for real money directly by CCP. This makes it “the only item in the game directly tied to real-world currencies”.

But it also acts like gold does in real world trade markets – a safe place for dirtbags to store their wealth. So it makes sense that CCP would want such a good to remain roughly the same everywhere. Stable. Goldish. In the short term, it may make Plex cheaper, as players selling it now have to compete against every other seller in the galaxy – not just their local star regions. In the long-term, everything may simply level out.

None of this, as far as I can tell, is related to the developers’ ongoing attempts to drive players towards Eve Frontier, a spin-off game that is full of blockchain bullshit and harbouring a cryptocurrency called the “Eve Token”. CCP are incresingly shy of mentioning these facts in their marketing and advertising, but you can read about it by scrolling down their FAQ. My advice: avoid.

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