It creates a very dangerous mentality and comparison in a game. Lets take EvE as a good example when news comes out how corps burned through millions of dollars in a war.
Why Millions? How did they come to that conclusion that is madness its just pixels not real....oh boy it became real the moment money was able to be converted into in-game credits through the trading of PLEXs aka Buy a subscription you could sell to others on the market. Which led to money exchange into credits.
The difference with EvE? Its bound to a supply/demand from the players with that the "worth" goes up and down and its a actual cargo, that can be lost or stolen aswell as used up.
Tied to that its actual fine, WoW did the same thing.
The thing that is crucial to understand here is that in EVE,
you never converted cash into credits. You did not buy in-game currency. What you did was trade (real)
playtime against real cash.
The in-game money (ISK) was only ever created through regular in-game means — the amount was regulated by the faucets and sinks that were built into the game and its gameplay. Every last ISK-cent came out of a player spending time engaging in the various NPC interactions that triggered an ISK payout (most commonly some variant of mission-running or ratting). Meanwhile, the actual
value of that amount was regulated by various market forces, notably the total supply and the time required to create that ISK — if someone found a new way to markedly improve the earning rate, the value of ISK took an instant dive; if CCP introduced a powerful new ISK sink, the value went up. Someone who had lots of free time to play the game could use PLEX as an intermediary to effectively trade that play time against someone else's
work time. That other player might not have as much free time, but would instead have more free cash, and everyone ended up happy when one was traded for the other. Consequently, the market price of a PLEX would vary significantly, regulated by both the money supply and that effort-for-ISK/playtime reward ratio.
Crucially, the whole transaction was almost 100% economy neutral. It did not affect the ISK supply or the effort ratio. It did not affect the value of anything other than the value of PLEX itself, but that was obviously a regular self-regulating supply/demand system.
There was also no (legal) way of cashing out. The whole thing made it convenient and easy to measure the “real-money value” of a ship, but the actual real value of anything was always zero. You could not sell your $5000 ship for $5000 (or… well… you
could, but if you got caught, you'd lose everything you owned in-game, quite possible including the friendship of other players since they got their stuff confiscated as well because of you). So the whole system rather worked to deflate the value and in- and out-of-game damage done by regular “gold selling.”
Everything that EVE does right to avoid real-life cash polluting the economy, SC does wrong. There is no regulation of value in either direction: as cash influx changes the value of credits (and it will change), there is no mechanic to balance or counteract that inflation. Similarly, as credit value changes (and, again, it will change), there is no mechanic to balance or counteract the change in how much your cash payment is now worth. Since you are allowed to cash out by selling your stuff, there is also a strong incentive to screw with this system as much as humanly possible, which, since there are no regulations or safeguards, will mean that the in-game economy will crash instantly, and anyone who payed for credits will be screwed over something fierce.
By incentivising anything that makes
CIG money, they have created a system that is inherently ruinous and untenable for the actual game they're trying to make. Their development funding scheme has sabotaged one of the most crucial systems they need to develop. At some point, they either have to give up that development, or change their development funding scheme. Anyone who is currently supporting this system by pouring cash into it will be worse off the more they support it, and ultimately, chances are that CIG will also suffer huge losses as a result.
