Original sentence: EVE's EULA forbids the exchange of ISK for real currency, however there is an open market for "Game Time Codes" (GTC) in exchange for in game currency.From a technical point of view, the economy in EVE is known as an open economy, that is there is no fixed amount of money or materials in the universe
Edited sentence: CCP tightly controls the exchange of ISK for real currency in most cases.From a technical point of view, the economy in EVE is known as a "Faucet/Drain" or open economy, that is there is no fixed amount of money or materials in the universe.One of the primary inefficiencies in the EVE economy is the balkanization of regions in the game.Players are unable to view the bid ask in any other region than the current region, therefore not allowing them to set an efficient price given the actual risk and supply and demand driven economics.Since the galaxy is subdivided into independent regions where player remote interaction is severely restricted, often prices are extremely disjoint between these regions.The typical 90 day GTC retails for about $39 and is marketable for around 400 million ISK.There is, however, a thriving open market for "Game Time Codes" (GTC) in exchange for in game currency.This allows for near arbitrage conditions, where the only real risk factor is whether or not someone will exploit the buy side order after a player has purchased on the sell side.Unfortunately since GTC themselves are not easily convertable back into real currency this conversion is also imperfect.Unfortunately there tends to be fewer sinks than sources in the Eve economy leading to a generalized devaluation of the ISK over long periods.Unlike other games where either the rules are lightly enforced or an active market is encouraged, CCP will tend to severely punish players caught buying or selling ISK for real currency, thus making any reliable currency conversion factor hard to determine since the black market prices tend to not correctly account for buyer side risk.Using the one way conversion of dollars to ISK one can see that the essential exchange rate is about $0.095/Million ISK (approximately $10 for 105,000,000 ISK)