I have been going through the CCP 2013 financial statements which were recently released - more on that in another post here.
One interesting line on page 30 in the Deferred Income note is a line called "In-game purchases not yet consumed".
Deferred Income are revenues for which the company has received cash for in 2013 but which is meant for 2014.
So, the question here is what cash did CCP receive in 2013 which will be a sale in 2014?
A good example (but not the answer) is subscriptions. Someone who buys a 6 month subscription on the 1st November 2013 will have 2 months of their cash payment recognised as a sale in 2013 and then the 4 months (January - April) recognised as Deferred Income. In this case, there is a separate line for Subscriptions in the Deferred Income note. So "In-game purchases not yet consumed" refers to something else.
My guess at the moment is that "In-game purchases not yet consumed" refers to Plex or time codes bought but not yet used.
The "In-game purchases not yet consumed" for 2013 is $2,108,158 (vs 2012 of $1,067,512). So, if i was to assume that each Plex cost $15 then that would indicate that there are 140,544 Plex sitting in the game waiting to be used (vs 71,167 in 2012). That does seem a bit high.
As a sense check, there are currently (as i write this blog post) 1,143 Plex for sale in Jita. Eve-Central has noted 1600 up for sale across Eve.
Therefore, i assume there are other items that are included in "In-game purchases not yet consumed".
You are missing a lot of PLEX, remember the 'pile of PLEX' confiscated by the GM team mentioned by Dr. Enyo? Besides that you have also to count Aurum in EVE, including all non-active accounts, same as stored PLEXes in inactive accounts as 'future' investment. Also a lot of PLEX can be queued on accounts that have dual char training active, I dont know if that can be done on normal account timers too, but if so, you would have to count that queue too. Besides the 1600 of EVE central, and all above mentioned, there would be a uge speculative pile @ aliance hangers and speculaters in general, so... dont know if it is like you say. Just my two cents ;).
ReplyDeleteThe thing with plex is that taking a snap shot of plex on the market doesn't account for people who have been stockpiling plex over time. A few people I know have been consistently buying plex over time as to not drastically affect the price. One of them bought 5 plex a day for a year straight and he's getting a little nervous because he just doesn't know how inflated the price of plex is because it's being removed from the market as an investment rather than being consumed. So there are massive stockpiles of game time that if put on the market would just crash it.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing is that PLEX that hasn't been redeemed in-game will not show up in-game but will in the CCP balance sheet.
ReplyDeleteyes, that is correct. The accounting entry is
DeleteDebit Cash
Credit In-Game Purchases not yet Consumed