We’ve written a lot of headlines with the phrase ‘PLEX-style’ in them lately. Wildstar adopted an Eve-like business model with their own acronym, CREDD, and now Blizzard are introducing the WoW Token – another opportunity for players to pay their way with in-game gold.
CCP have watched these experiments from afar, with excitement and no small sense of pride.
“We’re excited that people at other companies are looking at the PLEX idea and implementing it in different ways in their games,” said Erlendur Thorsteinsson.
The Eve senior development director pointed out that PLEX was an unusually “player-driven” variant on free-to-play.
“Player-driven, player-gated,” said Thorsteinsson. “We’re excited to see that others are adopting a similar style and experimenting with it.”
Having worked on Eve since serious conversation began around PLEX in about 2007, Thorsteinsson is proud to see CCP’s radical economic ideas take hold.
“It was very interesting to be a part of that early discussion,” he said. “We didn’t really know how it would pan out. [It was] an early experiment that we did in modifying how the universe works on the fly and being able to control it and figure out how it works.
“Obviously now many, many years later people understand it much better.”
Do you think you’ll be redeeming WoW tokens for game time anytime soon?