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MMO Item-Trading Corporation Buys Rival

Posted by simoniker on from the sinister-keiretsu dept.

madgeorge writes "According to a Waterthread post, MMORPG item trading businesses Yantis and IGE are now one and the same. I'm definitely in the wrong business." The specific press release mentions that "Internet Gaming Entertainment, Ltd, the worldwide leader in the market for buying and selling virtual property used in multiplayer online games, announced today that it has agreed to acquire substantially all of the assets of Yantis Enterprises, Inc.", and notes: "With more than 80 employees and thousands of suppliers, IGE is the largest provider in the world of virtual currency exchange and game-enhancement services to players of MMORPGs. The company provides 24x7x365 customer service and tech support from its state of the art operations center in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong." We've previously discussed IGE and its relation to alleged 'MMORPG sweatshops'.

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Big money by Silicon+Mike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's big money in this, unfortunatly. There's alot of people who think Yantis is the scum of the earth, but there are quite a few people who have claimed he's bought EQ related web sites for 5 figures, and if you read FOH (one of the better known everquest guild) message boards @ www.fohguild.org, people are claiming he's gotten over 10 million for the company. 10 million for selling virtual property is insane.

    1. Re:Big money by wizarddc · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You say selling virtual property is insane, but isn't that exactly what content producers are doing? What's the difference between selling text, audio, and motion pictures and selling some virtual currency or some loot? In the end, it's all just bits, and what makes those bits valuable is who wants to get a hold of them. Most people don't see buying movies, cd's and books as insane, only because we're used to it. And in the end, isn't this what "Intellectual Property" is? Just some virtual creation that you say you've layed stake to? How can you differentiate between the bits that make up Lord of the Rings being a solid investment and the bits that make up Enchanted Sword Of Slaying +8 being just silly? It's your oppinion that matters, but it only matters to you. And the people selling it, I guess. If no one had the opinion that it was worth paying real money for fake money, no one would be selling it.

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  2. Economics by eyeball · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Would it be weird if an item trade company became so profitable that they could buy the game company itself? What a weird economic machine that would be.

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    1. Re:Economics by missing000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or how about the game company itself (We are talking Sony here BTW), starts selling items itself and undercuts these people selling worthless shit.

      I think that would be more likely.

  3. Re:Should it be stopped? Can it be stopped? by ReyTFox · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't forget that in addition to people doing the "real work" in any business or industry, there are also middlemen like distributors, retailers, etc.. You can't say that these middlemen contribute anything particularly great, but at the same time they are necessary to facilitate the well-being of the economy in lieu of, say, technology that would put them out of the picture.

    In MMORPGs, the middlemen could lose their business in the blink of an eye if the game's owners decided to provide their own system facilitating the use of real money in virtual trade. I would call it a "high-risk" business on just that standpoint alone.

    In addition, insurers probably also don't offer policies for "loss of virtual items due to crash."