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."

Comments

Working at home

[rf0]

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

Re:Working at home

[Catharz]

I have a friend who spent a year playing EQ day after day. He racked up over 100 days of playing time during that year.

Did he miss out on friends, family, etc? Not to any great extent.

Was he lonely? Definitely not.

You end up creating some great friendships out of games like this. I've been half way around the world and visited people I've known from EQ. My friend eventually gave up EQ and moved from Austraila to the US where he's now happily married to one of the people he spent much of that time playing with.

At the time he quit EQ, his character was one of the most uber necros on the Tunare server but worth at most $1500 USD at that time.

You can certainly make money from these games, and you won't necessarily become a lonely hermit while doing it. But your social life will suffer and it will take a lot of work to make the same money.

Older article from someone doing this

[jeroenb]

was on K5 a while ago, it's basically a HOWTO.

I played, I sold, I quit

[MasterSLATE]

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?

Re:Problem with it is ...

[Motherfucking Shit]

Bet you anything he works longer hours than he did at his 'real job' to make anywhere near as much money.

I wouldn't be so sure. When I was playing UO actively (I sold my accounts in July 2002, only to open a new one earlier this year, though I haven't logged in for months) there was already a buzzing business surrounding ingame items. At the time, the exchange was generally something like:

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,

"It has more than 225,000 active players, who spend up to 20 hours per week in Britannia."

Geez, I used to spend 10 or more hours a day playing UO. I guess that qualifies me as a reformed addict...

Re:Problem with it is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Woah, Hey now.

[Jason Scott]

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.

Re:Problem with it is ...

[evslin]

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?

Re:Online exchange

[Motherfucking Shit]

This seems to be something that the online games are going to have to address quickly. As I recall from previous posts, they've made it against the rules to sell items, but is that really enforcable? Why not legalize and regulate the trading industry with items that are "signed" or somehow unique to prevent "duping" or other bugs? An auction system similar to ebay or a simple marketplace exchange would perform this service quite well.

Ultima Online doesn't forbid selling or trading items outside of the game, and in fact at one point someone from OSI was bragging that that the UO gold piece had an exchange rate similar to that of the Lira. The fact that UO items are seen to have real value is (or was) a source of pride to some of the folks running it.

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 :)

Re:It's an industry in Diablo 2

[ottothecow]

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

EverQuest

[kinki]

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.

Child labor

[Anonymous Coward]

"The producers are the teenage kids that have a lot of time on their hands but no money so they go out and hunt and loot and craft and produce the stuff that I am buying and selling," he says

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. :-)

I put myself through college with Diablo II

[SoVi3t]

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

Sigh. We already did the maths on this

[Rogerborg]

$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.

This works great for some..

[-noefordeg-]

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.