CCP may offer more goods for PLEX, including EVE Online merchandise

EVE Online publisher CCP is considering selling more physical items in-game after the rousing success of its PLEX-for-cards cheme.

Senior producer Jon Lander said the success of the CCP's team up with nVidia is proof people are keen on the idea.

"It was an interesting experiment and one we’re going to follow up. As it was more successful than I was hoping, there’s obviously quite an appetite out there to doing this sort of thing," he told MCV.

“We’re certainly hoping for EVE merchandise. We need to just look at what the right opportunities are now. We’ve got lots of people beavering away trying to work out what the right thing to do is.”

The PLEX-for-cards scheme allowed EVE Online players to use blocks of subscription time - PLEX - to purchase a new GPU. What makes this interesting is that players hadn't necessarily paid real world money for the PLEX, instead trading in-game goods for them with the cash-rich but time poor.

If the ramifications of that aren't clear to you, just know that CCP is very, very careful about how it meddles with the MMO's sprawling economy; it will never go free-to-play, for example.

“Unless you’re in trouble or you actually build a game from scratch specifically for a free-to-play model, it’d be incredible damaging to EVE if we went free-to-play. There’s no need for us to do it,” Lander said.

Thanks, Massively.