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PLEX for GOOD - Pakistan Monsoon Flooding (2010)
Image: CCP Games · (c) CCP Games (used under CCP fan-content policy)
Eight months after Haiti, the second PLEX for Good drive of 2010 raised $38,900 for Red Cross relief efforts in Pakistan following the catastrophic summer monsoon flooding that displaced an estimated 21 million people.
PLEX for GOOD - Pakistan Monsoon Flooding (2010)
The summer 2010 Pakistan floods were one of the worst natural disasters of the decade. Beginning in late July 2010, monsoonal rainfall triggered catastrophic flooding along the Indus River basin that ultimately killed over 2,000 people, destroyed more than a million homes, and displaced or otherwise affected an estimated 21 million Pakistanis - roughly one in seven people in the country. UN officials at the time called it a slower-moving but larger-scale humanitarian crisis than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
CCP ran its second PLEX for Good drive of 2010 in response. The drive launched on 15 September 2010 and ran through 6 October 2010, with proceeds going to the Red Cross flood relief operation. Players donated PLEX via the established in-game contract flow; CCP converted donations at the PLEX-dollar rate of the time.
The drive raised $38,900 - somewhat less than the 2010 Haiti drive's $49,401 eight months earlier, but materially more than the founding 2005 tsunami drive. The pattern of two drives in a single year did not become routine - the programme would not run again until the 2011 Japan earthquake six months later - but it confirmed the model's flexibility.
The Pakistan drive received less mainstream gaming-press coverage than the Haiti drive, partly because the broader Pakistan flood story was itself under-covered in Western media relative to its scale. For EVE community historians, the more interesting subplot was that the drive ran in parallel with the Hulkageddon II / III ganking tournaments - two tonally-opposite community campaigns coexisting in the same calendar year.