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A Real Living With Virtual Goods
RussHart writes "The BBC is reporting on a Julian Dibbell who has quit his day job to sell items from Ultima Online in the real world, hopefully making a living on which to support his wife & daughter."
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Well good luck to him. One problem I've found working at home is a lack of social interaction with friends. Also it can be far to easy to work at any time. Hopefully the online community will at least support him to some respect. However you can't beat a good drink out with the lads (or ladesses)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
was on K5 a while ago, it's basically a HOWTO.
I played UO back in the day (around 2000) and I managed to sell my account for about $500 (US dollars).
Personally, I can't understand how someone can actually quit their job to sell game items. To me, it's just not enough money for the work that must be done. What if the game goes under? Here's a whatever year old man with no job. Good luck getting a job, considering the market. What's he gunna do, move on to another game?
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and sell it as 10 lots of 1 million gold at $15 a pop
3) !!!Profit!!!
Or:
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and buy up tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of cut leather with the gold you got from eBay,
3) Sell the cut leather in lots of 60,000 on eBay
4) !!!Profit!!!
Often the deals wouldn't involve eBay, you'd just arrange 3 or 4 in-game bulk trades at bargain prices for some item, and then resell smaller quantities of that item right back on Tradespot for a higher price.
The people who are really making money from UO aren't the ones sitting around mining all day. They're the ones who spend a few hours making smart trades. It's sort of like the stock market; the guys working the factory are making minimum wage, but people trading that company's stock are the ones making real money.
Oh, and blockquoth the article,Geez, I used to spend 10 or more hours a day playing UO. I guess that qualifies me as a reformed addict...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Nope, he's a trader. He doesn't play the
game, but instead buys accounts from teens
who get bored with characters, and pieces
out the account items. He makes back 3x
what he pays for the account.
So no, he's not spending 24x7 slaying
monsters to build up an inventory.
This makes it sound like Julian Dibbell isn't what he is, a hack writer who mines the online communities he can find for grist. His article on MUDs (which he later expanded into a book was a complete smear job, a non-insightful overview of the MUD world intended to turn a small little molehill into enough of a mountain to get his paycheck. He writes self-indulgent overviews of his online comings and goings, each one crafted as if he has expertly stumbled into a forbidden cave of insight and perspective. No doubt this current project is the most recent seed for whatever next article or tome he will lure a credulous publisher into foisting on us. Take a pass, friends.
Also true - but I can guarantee you that if you do something for 60 hours a week you're going to get sick of it, regardless of what it is. Don't forget in addition to having to play the game to generate these items, he has to spend time outside of the game arranging transfers, setting up auctions, etc. He's also got something else to consider: If he sells too much (or if he has competition) the market could get saturated to the point of him not being able to sell anything else - can he afford to live without income until things get better?
UO now has an official account transfer program whereby the buyer and seller of an account both mail in a signed contract, pay $25, and the account is "cleaned" of any black marks and then given to the buyer. If that's not encouraging the sale of UO accounts (and, as always, finding a way to skim) I don't know what is.
As for ingame trades, they've addressed a lot of the old scams.
Used to be, when you transferred a house, it popped up a little scroll-looking object in the buyer's trade window with coordinates to the house. Plenty of people fell for the scam of dropping a house deed, or even some worthless magic scroll, in the trade window instead of actually transferring the house. Now, when you buy a house, special gumps pop up.
You used to be able to position a black floppy hat on top of a normal (10 gold piece) dye tub in the trade window, making it look like a then-coveted black dye tub. Black dye tubs at the time were labeled "dying tub" just like any other dye tub, so if the buyer checked the tub instead of clicking on the hat, he thought he was getting a black dye tub. They went in and relabeled all black dye tubs to "Black Dye Tub" to address that scam.
There are lots of other examples, but in general, UO does try to crack down on scamming and keep the trading safe.
ex-Frigax
Lake Superior
(heh, feels strange typing that again
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
if any "industry" is saturated, it would have to be D2. Everything in that game is botted or duped that you can buy (most items on ebay are sold as hacked or bugged items anyways) so its not exactly the same. When 1.10 comes out this should stop until someone finds dupe method because all the new Chars wont be able to use old items...tough deal to legit players but as a legit player myself (well I will return when 1.10 comes...I played a month ago hoping it would come but recently have stopped) I think 1.10 will be wonderful if ONLY for the ladder only chars
Bottles.
I have two friends who make their living by selling virtual stuff in EverQuest. The one who started it first now makes about $1000 a week... it took him about half a year to build a character sufficient enough though... the other one is just starting to make money but he says he can also make like 200-300 dollars a week.
++K
<[letter kay][at][number seventy seven][dot][finnish TLD]>
So isn't he (amongst others) using child labor? How ingenious to make work look like play.
A joke, of course, but the thought of having UO sweatshops where kids can play UO as long as they give the owner a share of the loot, is not far. :-)
Hmm, seems like prices have gone up a bit.
According to his web site, the current exchange rate is about $16.50 per million gold, or 165$ per 10 million.
Question:
How long would it take someone playing UO to honestly (or sneakily, in the case of a rogue) earn a million gold? It would be interesting to know what the pay grade is for playing, vs. how much one pays per month in user fees. One could use such data to convince one's rents that it will pay for itself (though it probably won't, unless gold is horribly inflated).
When I was still in college, I realized that I didn't have alot of money to play with. I thought about getting a job (I had quit my high school job to go to college), but then I realized that the hours would kill me (commuting to the job, working, then commuting back home, would waste valuable time that could be spent playing games and doing homework). So I just made an MF sorc, and started doing runs. I would play for maybe 3 or 4 hours a day, and in between classes. I never used any bots (out of fear), only maphack. Every day or so, I was able to get myself some Ith equipment, rare runes, and so much more. Then I'd be off to eBay, to make some profit. While this may piss off alot of you, I was able to go drinking several times a week, and take my girlfriend out often enough to keep her with me to this day, and buy myself things to amuse myself with. Much better than flipping burgers at Wendy's, like I used to, although not quite what I am making now :P
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
"what you're descibing is arbitrage "The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy."."
Or you could call it capitalism.
"you could buy spices in the the East Indies for a bag of nails and sell them for their weight in gold in Amsterdan"
You can do that now, only its coke, not spices.
$1000 in 3 weeks, while his wife and kids were away. They're going to be eating a lot of rice and lima beans, and let's hope they don't get ill.
Heck, let's go over the numbers again:
"Mr Big" is one of a handful of Ultima players who make six figure sums annually from their trades.
Assuming "six figure" is $100,000, at an average auction price of $7 (which seems to be the case from the ones I've seen) that's 14285 transactions per trader per year, or 40 competed transactions each and every day of the year for these traders. Cutting that back to an 222 working day year, it's 64 completed transactions per day.
Push the average value up, and it becomes more manageable, but then you have to spend more time on each trade. And remember, you've only got 225,000 rubes to sell to. If the "handful" of six figure traders is three, then that's $1.33 from each and every rube every year, which seems reasonable until you consider the dozens, hundreds, thousands of casual traders scrabbling for their money.
It's easy to say that you're making money at this. It's even possible to fool yourself. But until I see IRS filings, I'm going to take it with a huge pinch of salt.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Especially if you are from contries outside North America/Western Europe.
:)
There are a lot of these people out there.
I knew someone from eastern Europe doing this. He was playing Asheron's Call and he with the help from someone in the US they used to by and sell things by using E-bay/tradeboards etc.
Some of them play a lot but he also make more money of this than having some ordinary job. And making a living off a computer game is not hard if you live in Ukraine.
PayPal, Ebay and mmorpgs have made us a new border free worldwide market. Where $10 is just as easy to obtain in US, Norway, or in Ukraine, where $10 is valued so much more than in western countries.
For those that think this only applies to 'super nerds' you are way off!
These are people who are just very good at buying and selling things, just like a good broker. They have the ability to analyse the game and to guess what the next patches/improvements to the game, by the developers, will be. A nerd would probably be happy to sell something to the first person giving a reasonable offer, so he could go back and play the game, the buyer however, most likely one of these guys, have probably already found another buyer willing to pay twice the price.
I tried this for a bit when I played Asheron's Call too. But problem is that you spend more time on boards/talking to people than you spend ingame playing. Also, with the insane economy we have in Norway it would probably be one of the worst places to actually do this kind of business from.
For comparison, I could buy a powerful ingame character (something I have done several times), which would have taken someone several months of ingame playing time to level up, for the money I make in one day in real life. But for someone in a less wealthy nation the money might be comparable to half a year of ordinary income.
For some it would probably be a pretty ok job.
You need some luck tho. The guy I knew had a mother working at some school/university in Ukraine, so he had pretty much free access to internet.
Welcome to the Real World... where every social structure has a critical population limit which, when surpassed, allows a small number of idiots to ruin the fun for the majority of the members.
Remember CB radio? How about Usenet News? They used to be good, and now they're mostly crap.
After reading his blog and the bbc article, it's fairly misleading to say he quit his job. He is a hack writer who has obviously been writing similar subjects(online worlds, etc) for a while. This "project" is simply an extension of that job. More likely he'll write an article or whatnot and sell it to some publisher/magazine somewhere. Might even get a book out of it. Read between the lines.
Job security.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Nothing much new here, a friend of mine (in the US) makes his living with Everquest. A rather well off ceo of some smaller company pays him a stipend to be "on call" when the guy plays he only has a little bit of time so my friend has his character ready and waiting to do "fun stuff" if the dude dies he just tells my friend where his corpse is so he can do the drudge work of recovering it for him while the exec is away from the game.
On top of that, he gets paid to help people level up ($20 an hour), and sells items and premade characters (he told me about this single sword he sold for $1500 apparently it was quite hard to get). Last time I talked to him he'd just bought a (nearly new) minivan, put an addition on his house, and was not bitching about money problems, and his wife definitely doesn't make the income for those kinda upgrades to their life so while I didn't get a firm figure I know he's gotta be pulling in 35K at least to get by, and I suspect it's more.
He gave an offer of joining him, teamwork makes things more efficient and while I considered it I really didn't want to base my living on the whims of the online world (funny thought coming from the owner of a web hosting company).
--- www.f-theocean.com
I don't play games of this type, so I don't know how you possess items in the game, but if this guy is amassing large quantities of virtual goods for real-world sale, what's to keep a bunch of players from robbing his storehouse or killing his character and making off with his loot?
You've just taken a large portion of this guy's real-world income. Can you get arrested for that? Could he sue you and win? It just a game, right?
My mom is an antiques dealer, your example is especially valid there too. For anyone who's wondering why there are SO MANY people who deal in antiques and make a decent living, it's all about knowledge.
The average person knows far less about real value of antiques than they do about their computer(and we know how dumb the average lUser is). Many people hang on to items of little to no real monetary value (grampa's beer stein collection, mass-produced items, etc), but are fairly quick to part with "that old chair" or "that plate that doesn't match anything" when those are actually the things of value
TV shows such as "The Antiques Roadshow" only further the unfortunate misplaced optimism of the common person. At least weekly someone comes into my Mom's shop with something of mild collectible value (>$20) expecting it to be worth thousands because they've seen one too many fantasy stories on AR. However there is also the advantage to the dealers that most people don't know what they have. Many people who have just lost a relative will get rid of things at auction/yard sale/etc that are worth a ton.
A common example of this is a piece of furniture called a "dry sink". Before indoor plumbing was popular, people still needed something in which to wash dishes so they had dry sinks, which were essentially a large piece of wooden furniture with a zinc-lined basin at about waist level and usually a few drawers or cabinets underneath. People could pour water in the basin and use it for whatever while using the cabinets/drawers for storage. Many dry sinks were destroyed with the advent of modern day indoor plumbing, but there were still a few that remained in existence, collecting dust or being used for some other purpose.
When someone inherits a house, often they'll want to sell everything of value and throw away the rest so they can start anew. It is common practice for individuals to hire an antique dealer/expert to appraise/purchase whatever is valuable in the house. My mom was on one of these jobs and discovered in a house a dry sink that was being used as a COMPUTER DESK. While the computer was worth nothing (I was there, it was like a 75 mHz pentium), the dry sink was well finished, unmarred oak, still had all if the original fixtures, and the liner was nearly perfect. My mom easily dated it to around 1850, she ended up buying the piece for like $200, and sold it for over $2000 in less than a week.
While this is a rare occurance, it illustrates the point that certain "industries", especially those dealing with "synthetic" values thrive on the same principle of swap meets/UO trading.
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
Also, from a support issue. How do you support trading real life money for virtual goods? Currently, money changes hands outside of the game first and then their respective characters meet up within the game to exchange the item(s). Its very easy for someone to get burned and i'm sure the last thing a company wants to deal with is this.
Thats why they won't officially support it and as long as they are on the record as saying its goes against their user agreement they'll have a better leg to stand on in both court and support.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I'm always amused when online games, like UO or EQ, suddenly observe something unique and think it is novel.
We've had people living off of GemStone III and DragonRealms for years. We have one individual, who's original occupation was Hollywood Screen Writer, give it up to be a merchant of virtual stuff in GemStone IIII. He makes good six figures doing it.
The guys background in economics has helped me really understand the dynamics of value in the product. Not only does he know the real "street" value of items, but he can predict with uncanny accuracy the change in item values based on rule changes that happen from time to time. Using that knowledge he can min-max real world money making opportunities.
Games like GS and DR have the added advantage that we have so much unique content that it's impossilbe for a graphical game to even touch the plethora of "things" that can be bought and sold. Even our own graphical stuff in the works. This makes for an amazingly diverse market.
So tuned in the economy is this guy that he can detect an exploit or bug before our GMs or automated sensors even notice. If, say, a player found a way to duplicate items and sell them, we find out about it through him first. After all, its in his interest to keep the value of stuff high.
We've also used him to help develop a model for how the economy should work. MMPOGs are, generally speaking, not zero-sum so you cannot make anything that works well by trying to model a real-world economy. You have to make something new and different. But it still has to work for there to be any game play benefit much less real-world cash to be made.
The observation that we, as the providers of the game, have the ability to just ruin the economy at any time is a good one. I've made it myself. I could wipe out some people's livelihoods on a whim. But he has pointed out to me that my economic motivation is in line with his and so that is a rather unlikely thing for me to do. And he's right. I strive to keept he economic aspects of our titles healthy because that promotes the life-time value of the customer (good game = customers stay and pay longer).
David Whatley
I think some people are over reacting on this, I mean is cool that games have advanced to an state as such, but this is not something ever seen before.
Think about it, do baseball, football, soccer or [insert fav sport here] players actually produce something material and tangible for what they get payed? (which in some cases is several thousands of dollars) No, they produce goals, homeruns, "wins" that only exist on the same context of the game (they are virtual), yet people expend REAL money on watching them play because they consider it a popular "entertainment".
Now what about collectors and collection items sellers? people who sell autographed shirts, and balls that were catched in the park? the value of those items is "real"? no, is "virtual" they have now a new Virtual value which collectors use to buy (and sell) the "collector" item, however the "real" value since the mass and structure of the ball plus some particles of ink which is the same, with a price around $10 but now increased to thousands of dollars, because of its "collector" value.
Fast forward to our day and the same happens on games which are today popular entertainment, first we got the paid gamers first the "testers" then we had the "cyber athletes" and now we have the "collectors" the people who get "collector" items from popular games and sell them on "collector" prices, there is little diference between a guy who sales an autographed basketball than a guy who puts a "silver sword" on the market. Sure you get a few pounds of inflated plastic in the real world, but you must consider that getting Michael Jordan basketball (or even Jordan himself) in a virtual world will actually make you score easier.(you wish it was like that in the real world)