Gamer Grinds 80 Hours Each Month in Eve Online For Free Subscription Time Purely To Snub Developer

In Eve Online players can buy subscription time tokens from the developer and then sell them for in-game currency, which other players can then purchase and use in lieu of a paid subscription. And one player has gone to all-out lengths to avoid paying the developer a single cent.

CCP Games, in a random data reveal on Twitter, showcased how one enterprising individual in Eve Online has spent 40-80 hours each month for the past 15 years simply grinding in-game resources to avoid paying the $10-15 USD subscription fee to them (actual cost depends on region and subscription length as longer subscriptions are cheaper per month).

The gamer “F1ght Capitali5m” diligently mines in Eve Online until he has enough in-game currency to buy enough subscription tokens, then goes about his business for the rest of each month. Mining is particularly poor in secure space in Eve Online, where this player mines, so it is quite a time-intensive task for little reward. Any other player would probably do a cost-benefit analysis and decide that working a low-paying job for a single hour or two to pay for the entire month’s subscription time would be the obvious choice.

The Onion reached out to this player for comment and all we received back was “I refuse to participate in the wealth theft from the working class to pay rent-seeking parasites like CCP Games.”

The irony of exchanging 80 hours of labor for 1 hour of another’s seems to be lost to F1ght Capitalism. CCP Games further commented that players such as these are a crucial backbone of the in-game economy.

CCP Droldanl tweeted out after much discussion online, “Where else could you get someone to work 80 hours for 20 cents per hour in the over-regulated real-world labor market? Labor laws don’t apply in the virtual world lol. F1ight Capitali5m is effectively an unpaid worker in our game, to benefit our economy and other players.”