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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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If you're not duping items or some such, it's because you're in front of the game for hour after hour after hour hording things to sell on ebay. Bet you anything he works longer hours than he did at his 'real job' to make anywhere near as much money.
...instead of being afraid that officials'll crackdown on this and kill his livelihood?
In a capitalist society, items are worth exactly what the market will bear. Notice that nowhere here is there a distinction about corporial/non-conrporial items.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I've been following his blog since he wrote "The Unreal Estate Boom" for Wired.
I haven't even played Everquest but it still makes for interesting reading.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
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.
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]
I mean, what do developers for money each day? - Generally, they create code that has no real substance outside the digital realm. Sure it might be useful to some folks, but game items are equally useful to the players using them.
I know little about these games, but it seems to me there's better money in a hack to produce virtual goods outside the context of the game, and bring them in. Eg, produce compatible objects in code, and insert it into the game. Consider it as an Import business. I'll ignore the economic ramifications for now though...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Back in the 90's, quite a few people that visit Slashdot made a good living on virtual services. Ahh, venture capital.
Are his wife and daughter in the real world too, or are they virtual items? I have been thinking about purchasing a wife to auger my girl friend.
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.
You now owe me a new Dr. Pepper, preferrably not dispensed through my nose.
So what happens here? Will the cops go after the virtual pillagers who stealed his virtual stock (Out of wich he does make real money and can argue that they stole actual stock from his actual business model)?
I wonder if as this kind of virtual-real world mixtures come to play into the real-world economic system then will officials/authorities step in and regulate the virtual worlds or something..
It's the American dream!
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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.
no real-life but real goods.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
BIA(Brittanian Industrial Average) plummeted today. Analysts cited over-valuation as a major cause of the sudden drop in virtual commodity prices. "Virtual Futures just aren't performing as well as most E-bay traders had hoped." ........ President Bush's invasion of Brittania for 'virtual weapons of virtual mass destruction' without UVN consent also seems to have contributed to the poor market conditions....... Two virtual traders jumped out their windows in response to the market's downward plunge, but only managed to break their ankles. "He must have thought he was in a skyscraper. Good thing he was only in our living room!"
I guess you could say the same thing about much of commercial law, the stock market,and insurance. And there is more money in all these things than in being a real producer or creator.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
SCO is trying to do that too.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
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. :-)
"Real world" money defeats the purpose of the MUD or MMORPG, as this is for myself, and as I understand this to be for many others.
As I have said in the past, the hope in the ideal of the MUD or MMORPG is that who or what we may be in the "real world" does not in any way limit who or what we can be in this alternate reality.
While one individual selling items for "real world" cash may not have significant effect, this behavior, in principle, is unacceptable if the above is the purpose of the MUD or MMORPG.
When my opportunity to behave as I would like and have a legitimate expectation to be able to in this alternate reality is restricted as a result of my subservience in the "real world" to the political and economic power of another, or of the elite, then I have not even in this alternate reality escaped their reach.
While we might certainly pretend that those who are powerful in this alternate reality as a result of their political and economic power in this reality, are not so for this reason, but are instead for some false or fanciful reason put in the context of the alternate reality, I refuse to do this, and I urge other concerned persons to voice this position.
Why would we bring this upon ourselves? Is the political and economic power of the elite of this world not sufficiently overbearing, that we should directly permit behaviors which have the effect of extending their reach into another?
Does the thought entertain you, that your superior who has power over you from Monday to Friday, from 9 to 5, can for a price extend his power over you, his enjoyment at the price of your integrity, and his opportunity at the price of your hope, even when you at home think you have finally escaped?
I will not be the pawn of another's wealth; not in this world, and not in any other.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
I feel sorry for his kid... come Christmas it'll be 'Guess what Santa's bought you - it's an IOU for a +4 Silver Sword of Burning!'
Yeah - and the traditional christmas meal of +5 fries-with-that of Arse Widening. (Arse Widening in the fat sense - not the goatsex sense!)
...that the artical makes out like MONEY is somehow real. C'mon people, money hasn't been real since the Gold Stardard was dropped, and depending who you talk to it wasn't real even then. The value of anything is determined by what people agree it is worth - everything: cars, your house, your labour, big businesses, shares, options, and yes, even imaginary gold.
* Neo pays with plastic
<Morpheus> You think that's money you're spending now?
It's ALL virtual. The sooner you realise that the sooner you can stop being a slave to money.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Purchasing characters and items removes much of the fun from these games. It trivializes the progression path that you would otherwise normally take and provides a 'quick hit' solution for those who can't be bothered with spending months building their characters up themselves and with their online friends. If that's what people want to do with their money, then so be it. Players build up reputations over a period of time (they can also be torn down rather quickly). Characters that have been purchased online can easily be spotted by experienced players as the person playing it often has little or no clue how to play properly. Many of the serious gaming guilds won't allow an "ebay" character to join in with their fun as they have not taken the time to build up a trusting relationship with guild, and a guild won't want to help a player who may simply sell his character on for profit in 6 months time. So individuals who buy and sell characters and items are often viewed as untrustworthy by players who play by the rules and build their characters up the hard way.
Game admins in MMOGs like UO and EQ have the power to create items, or edit accounts, or something similar whereby they can arbitrarily collect real-world saleable items. They could hoard a large number of very highly prized items or just a huge amount of gold, and then sell them to real players, creating money out of nothing - no hours spent crawling the landscape and no risk taken with real-world trading. They wouldn't even need to do it with their own account, simply use their higher knowledge of the gamescape to point a pleb account they own to the locations of hidden hoards of items or prizes.
I'm not saying game admins are a dodgy lot, I'm sure most if not all of them are completely honest, but all it would take is one guy with just the right amount of in-game power to crank up quite the profitable R(PG)acket.
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!!!
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ok i'm joking. but if you really want to shell out $$$ for slashdot user, let me know, ok ?-D
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Most people who work for themselves put in more hours for less pay. Why do they do it? Because they like working for themselves, or they want to do something they enjoy. In this case it's probably the latter: he is spending all day playing an online game!
It tends to fluxuate. I can remember several years ago when it was around $30 per million, $35 if you needed it right away or bought smaller amounts.
At that time, being a millionaire in UO wasn't rare, but it wasn't common, either. When I first started the game, it took me several months to earn 100,000 gold pieces to buy a house from someone. Fast-forward a few years. A couple of duping bugs, along with a house deed exploit, brought mass inflation and the price of gold bottomed out around $10 per million. In comparison, the house that cost me 100,000 gold pieces some two years prior was selling for 5-6 million! Around the time I quit playing seriously, the gold price had climbed a bit, back to $15 or so per million. I guess it's risen a bit higher since then.
There are also variations from sale to sale even throughout a single day. There's no standard rate, it's sort of like filling up your gas tank. One gas station might be charging $1.659/gallon, then you drive 3 blocks down the road and another station is selling it for $1.599. Similarly, you might go to Tradespot and find someone selling a million gold for $17.50, and no other sales are open, so you buy it. Ten minutes later someone else posts saying they've got gold for sale at $15 per million; you win some, you lose some.
And, just like any other business, there are always a) suckers and b) desperate customers. If gold is averaging $15.00, there'll be some guy posting 10 eBay auctions with a minimum bid and Buy It Now of $17.50, and probably half of them will sell. Someone who needs a few mil in a hurry - say, to buy a house - might stand at the bank in-game and offer to pay $20 per million; it's faster than going over to one of the trading boards.
This varies wildly. When I was last playing, experienced players who had built up or purchased decent characters (and had time to spare) could make 1 or 2 million a day through honest play, using normal game mechanics as opposed to cheating or exploiting. I didn't find this type of person to be the average profiteer, though. Like the parent mentioned, spending 8 hours "working" only to reap $30 or so is no bargain. I used to enjoy powergaming now and then, where I'd spend a day or two doing nothing but trying to earn as much gold as possible, but it was usually for my own spending in-game. After a day or two it always got very boring.
For awhile, there was a "taming boom" which introduced billions of gold pieces into the UO economy. At some point, people started to figure out that a single tamer towing around several dragons or drakes and a nightmare could literally own just about any dungeon room on the entire map. You could sit in one spot for hours on end, letting your tamed pets kill everything for you. When you wound up with more loot than you could carry, you made a quick round-trip recall to and from a bank to drop off the loot and pick up some bandages for the pets. Meanwhile, your pets gained stats and skills - and thus became stronger - from all the fighting.
And thus the taming boom started. Hunting in dungeons turned into a lame experience, because no matter where you went, you'd find tamers camping the good spawn spots. The tamers shouted "go to Felluca" but it was the same situation there, except that some of the tamers were killing each other. Worse, because taming became known as the way to make gold, and because UO became known as a game where you could make real money by playing, it attracted the worst of the worst. A game set in Victorian times tends to lose its atmosphere where you walk into the dungeon and encounter a group of tamers named PiMPiN HaRd, deeznuttz, KindGreenBud, and TupacLivzOn hogging all of the mons
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
...three years ago.
Mr Dibbell would have no doubt that a crime had been committed but he realises that he might have a hard time convincing the police to investigate the theft of goods that have a tangible value but negligible reality.
SCO?
I'm I the only one who finds this individual totally irresponsible for quitting his job doing this while he has to support a wife and child??? He's putting his addiction before his very own family. This guy needs professional help, and quick.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
$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.
Still cannot find a girlfriend.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
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 sold three accounts for $550 and bought two for $450 in under and it only took 25 minutes. (some waiting to get PayPal confirmations etc.) The guy I bought the two accounts from, had sold 4 other accounts the last 24 hours. Two for around $300 each. Look at this: E-Bay (ebay). Several transactions going to take place in the $100+ range. Adding to this, you don't have to live in the US/western Europe to play $1000 could actually be a lot of money. For the smaller transactions I know a lot of people buy something from someone on E-Bay, and when everything is ok, they later just contact the guy without using E-Bay and just pay them through PayPal, knowing that they can trust the seller. When that happens you have people just sending, lets say, $5 through paypal, and the seller shows up at a location providing them with 500k ingame cash (or whatever goods they wanted). It's like pay infront, and get free delievery. Also, in Asheron's Call you can have bots running, controlled from IRC, so whenever you recieve a confirmation from PayPal that GI Joe paid you $7 for 100 health elexirs, you just add 100 HE. to GI Joe's account on your bot (this is done from IRC). GI Joe shows up at your ingame house and picks up the 100 elexirs and you didn't even have to go ingame to controll the transactions. This way, I don't see a problem with doing a lot of small transactions every day. I think you are blocking your vision with too many real life problematic constrains, like most of us. But some people can make money out of anything, and they live at the stock exchange, run big corporations, earn lots of money from mmorpgs.... And they most likely have lots of fun doing it!
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?
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
Isn't he violating the TOS of UO (never played, so didn't read). I'm sure he's on the blacklist of any new MMORPG he tries to play much like the casinos do when players make money off the casino in ways they didn't intend or agree with.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
Too bad he has to get a real job now to pay his bandwidth bill after being linked to by slashdot.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.