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MMO Item-Trading Corporation Buys Rival
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'.
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.
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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2B1ASK1
Mr. Yantis would be well advised to keep the sale price a secret; he's wide open to a lawsuit and I'm surprised he hasn't gotten one. It's what prevented me from going heavily into the business.
As for IGE, how hard would it be for the game companies to shut these guys out. I mean they could probably get volunteer GM posses watching for suspicious behavior. I sold on Ebay, but what these guys do is ridiculous.
Now that companies like this are going through full-blown corporate mergers, is it just a matter of time before selling property like this to gamers becomes a viable business model?
Or will we have to wait for a "The Sims" of MMORPGs that appeals to a very broad audience for something like this to happen?
Or will this not happen at all...?
I honestly believe that it will be a viable format for business sometime in the near future, but the companies that have gotten a foothold already will be making a killing later.
Now, I'm all for computer gaming in general, I think if people played more computer games there'd be a lot less unpleasantness in the real world.
I used to play MUD's a long time ago, I even donated to the admins in exchange for "wishes" that increased my power in the MUD. The wish money was used for beer for the admins, paying the co-lo costs for the server, upgrades, and so on. It was a fair deal, I had fun on the MUD and these guys got rewarded for all the work they put in to the "Free as in beer" MUD.
But the MMORPG economy phenomenon (say that three times fast) is something remarkable and a little disturbing. I can't say that these people are advancing humanity by building new bridges or painting great works of art. So these are obviously "B Ark" people (along with used car salesmen and telephone sanitisers). Shouldn't resources be allocated somewhere more useful?
That, I realise is completely academic, despite Sony's attitude. People want to do the things they want to do, and if it doesn't hurt anyone else it's generally left alone (the exception is civil liberties in the USA, americans aren't allowed to use drugs, have privacy, etc etc).
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
gamingopenmarket.com opened recently in December. They are still small and not moving much EQ money or items, however they allow you to transfer wealth between games. Ready to cash out of the old treadmill and move to a new game? Their market pages are formatted to look like regular stock price histograms, complete with tranaction volume. The busiest market (hence the one with the most interesting plots) is for Second Life (secondlife.com).
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
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."
My question: -- MarkusQ
Have you ever seen how much some of the virtual money sells for?
It will make you even more furious. There are people out there seriously putting 2-3k on a credit card to get rich in a game.
It's messed up man, messed up.
I'm on a chair.
The dollar hasn't been backed by gold in ages. Dollars don't exist in the sense that you're thinking of them, except by convention.
More accurately, they're paying lots of money to twiddle a couple of bits in a database somewhere.
Verisign makes money doing the same thing. As do the name registrars. As do banks.
I think the thing here that's so different is that it's amazing that people are willing to *pay* for items in a game (For chrissake, it's a game. Isn't the whole point of a game to have fun *getting* the items?)
May we never see th
I'm vaguely reminded of HSC, later MetaCreations -- they made and sold a plugin (KPT) to enhance a program (Photoshop and Painter). A couple of years later, they had enough money to buy the host program (Painter) from the company that produced it.
May we never see th
Yes, but in some cases getting the items simply isn't fun. Having played a lot of these games, they are mostly fun, but occasionally you get mired into some quest for an item you really, really want, and find it's going to take days of camping the same spot for hours on end. Or killing boring, easy monsters over and over trying to make some cash. Instead of doing this, many opt to buy the tedious-to-get stuff for real cash, then go in to actually PLAY the game -- the fun parts, that is.
The dollar hasn't been backed by gold in ages.
I knew someone would trot out that old chestnut. The difference is that real money can get you things in the real world. The only thing MMORPG money can do is get you things in a video game. Even if you were able to trade game money for real money, it would still be stupid, because that would require some dumbass to give away real money for game money.
Rob
Some folks (employed adults without a lot of spare time, e.g.) might be willing to pay real money for advancement of their MMORPG character through the purchase of game money. And once there's a market for game money, then game money can get you real things in the real world.