Any sufficiently popular online game is closely tied to real money, it doesn't matter whether the vendor officially endorses it - or even actively tries to stam

Any sufficiently popular online game is closely tied to real money, it doesn't matter whether the vendor officially endorses it - or even actively tries to stamp it out. The sensationalist dollar amounts seem to be the main reason that these stories get read so widely. Someone could have bought it for that amount, or maybe he spent thousands of hours accumulating the resources in game and bought the ship because it was one out of 3 in existence. Just because you can put a price tag on it doesn't mean the player saw it as losing that much real money. "Don't fly it if you don't want to lose it" is common advice among EVE players.