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EverQuest and the UN
maddugan writes "NewScientiest.com has a
piece on how EverQuest has spawned an economy with a per-captia income comparable to that of a small country. Mostly from profiteering on eBay. If it was indeed a country, it would rank 77th, just behind Russia." It'll be quite interesting to see
what happens as MMORPGs gain popularity and absorb more and more man hours.
This is a lot like:1 25 9&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/23/213
Didn't we just hear about this the other day?
This article references the one we already had about the Norrath Economical Report...
The full research paper on this can be found here
I tried to post this article last week but it seems like I did something wrong because it got rejected.
Of course they aren't! If they were, the price for each item would be significantly lower, and the real GNP would be nowhere near what he is quoting. So in reality, if Norrath was a country, the GNP would not be as high as his estimate.
You can't "convert" an item to cash. All you can do is sell it to someone else for cash. Do you claim that, say, Egypt doesn't have an economy because the things produced there are rarely sold for dollars?
Here's an example of his argument: The game produces (via spawns or user manufacture) 10 swords of dragonthwacking per day. Those have an in-game value of 5000 platinum pieces. You can exchange pp for dollars on the open (though technically black) market at around 100:1. Thus, there are $500 worth of SoDs produced every day. Repeat these calculations for every item in the game, and from there you can figure out the GNP of Norrath.
Remember, GNP does not have anything to do with exports. GNP attempts to measure the complete value of the production in a country or place.
This is the same way that you can figure out, in dollars, the GNP of a place like North Korea. The closest analog to this would be to try to figure out how many things are sold by USians to USians for dollars in Mexico.
Since Ebay stopped Everquest auctions a while ago under preasure from Sony Playerauctions.com is the main site for Everquest auctions and has been for a while.
You can usually just a search for your server name or use their catagories. Doing a search for "prexus" as an example will show all the auctions on that server.
I could be wrong, but I'd imagine that those, amongst others, are where the $10/month goes. You may notice that most of the next gen MMPORPGs are looking at charging about double that to be able to stay profitable.
That'd the GDP, not per capita income. They were referring to GNI per capita; how much money each person in the country makes on average. Not how much money the country makes all together. In other words, Russia may be worth a lot of money, but that's just because they have a lot of people.
What?
First of all, it's the per cap (and not absolute) GNP that was claimed to put Everquest right around Russia. That's pretty meaningless, as it's a self-selected group of people from the richest countries in the world who have a lot of time on their hands. I mean, the per cap GNP of my house is several times higher than that of the richest country in the world. So what?
Secondly, France's GDP in 2000 was $1,448,000,000,000, which is a thousand times greater than the number you posted.
The difference between GNP and GDP in a nutshell is that GNP includes income generated by multinationals based in that country. For instance, Microsoft's worldwide income accrues to the US GNP but only its US income is counted for the GDP.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
For example, GDP per capita of Switzerland is ~$30,000. GDP per capita of China is less then $1000.
That sounds familiar. Does johnburton know you're plagiarizing his post?
I have a Ph.D. in international market economics in my family...Her opinion is that GDP/GNP as a statistic at all has fundamental flaws.
One of em (GDP, iirc...the domestic product) counts in everything made by non-US citizens living on US soil or employed by a company in the US. Bigger number.
GNP counts only stuff made by US citizens made on US soil. Smaller number.
I think a more meaningful statistic (speaking as a *not* Ph.D. in economics) is the per-capita yearly income. That compares, more accurately, the lifestyle of the people of that country on average, if they lived in your country...India's per-capita income is what...$10k/yr? Decent but that's dirt poor here in America. Guess what? So are most native Indians.
My $0.02 adjusted for inflation a few times, and probably wrongly.
Egypt has had an economy for around 6,000 years, continous and recorded. Just because it isn't in US dollars doesn't mean it isn't an economy. But here is the thing, their currency (the Egyptian Pound) is traded openly on the FX markets.
The argument you give is just plain stupid, sorry but its true. If I sell an original painting for $5,000 this does not mean that _every_ painting is worth that much, its diminishing returns, as the original poster said.
The US is NOT the measure of whether an economy has a GNP, GNP is the GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT of that country i.e. how much it produced IN ITS OWN CURRENCY this can then be traded on the FX to produce a Dollars, Euro or Sterling rate.
But it really is muppet-tastic to think that because you sell one item at X that you can sell n items at X. The example you give demonstrates the failure to grasp simple concepts.
If the US prints 1,000,000,000,000,000 1 dollar bills a day, then they'd be worth a damned sight less a week later.
Supply - Demand, this doesn't determine GNP, it determines scarcity v market. To multiply it up means that either
a) You don't understand economics AT ALL
or
b) You've also been nominated for a Darwin award because "Lead isn't poisonous in small doses so how can a bullet hurt ?"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi