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When Play Money Becomes Real
Thanks to Wired News for its article analyzing the commercial potential of the trade in MMO virtual items, focusing on Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), of which CEO Brock Pierce claims "has more than 100 full-time employees in Hong Kong and the United States... [and] is hiring about five new people a week." Pierce also makes claims that: "In this industry, it's eBay and us... we're the major players", and elsewhere, a Sony Online spokesperson "is aware of IGE and has spoken with the company" with regard to their EverQuest item sales, concluding: "At this point, we're still sort of trying to decide what direction the company's going to move in on this topic." We've previously covered the financial dealings of IGE.
or maybe a few days back. I have no idea if the two are related, I can't remember any of the guest names. But for us online gamers, this is pretty familiar to us... I play UO, and items there have been sold for real world cash for a long time.
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
I for one wouldn't want to have to cough up 6.5% VAT when I sell my +5 Vorpal. (But I'd rather do that than try to explain how I came into posession of it in the first place...)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
There's no problem with me when it comes to people trying to find a new way to make money. However, this really cheapens the game, competing against a company who's not out to have fun. That just puts a damper on things.
The MMORPG developers just need to close this loophole by stopping games from becoming a clickfest and to quit allowing characters to become near immortal. In fact, it might be an option to add some penalties for death. Regardless, it's up to the developers to make a game actually require some skill.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
I play Final Fantasy XI, and so far I have yet to see any real advantage to spending cash money to buy gil or other items in the game. To my understanding, the game's economies are structured to not take this sort of thing into account. Besides, in FFXI, gil is abundant if you just work a little for it (selling crystals, farming items at the AH, heck, even making some good deals at the AH/Bazaar).
I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to do it-- hey, it's their money-- but to me, at least, it defeats the purpose of playing the game. "I spent $500 on the best sword evar and now I'm a L1 Warrior with the Atma Weapon +5", which he can't use until level 70 anyway. It's far more impressive to either a) kill the monster guarding the sword or b) save up enough gil to buy it from another player. Either way, someone gets the fun intended-- and maybe you do too; maybe you like fishing better than fighting, and sell your catches at the AH for ungodly sums. That works too.
The point of all this rambling is that in older games, like UO (which I did play for about a week before I realized it was populated mostly by elitists who'd sooner give me a quick and messy death than the time of day), money was hard to come by and the methods for getting it were somewhat tedious. In newer games there are plenty of occupations that can earn a player money, and they're very diverse. Thus, buying money outside the game in these games could be seen as cheating by those who spend a weekend building up their skills in the hopes of becoming the next virtual millionaire.
Oh yeah, and this of course ignores the subset of MMO games where a primary way to get money is to buy it from the developers. Gunbound comes to mind as a big example.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Yeah I heard that. It was on yesterday afternoon. Really interesting to hear people talk about the games they play, they had some President from the Sims Online as well as some people who called in who played DaOC and stuff. Nice to see there is at least a little media attention being paid to it.
I think it's an acceptable practice to sell the items you work for. You do work for them, even if you don't realize it. There is a lot of time spent gathering items in a virtual world, and while it may be entertainment, there's nothing that says you can't enjoy being paid for those hundreds of hours you spent playing EQ or whatnot.
One thing NPR brought up, and it's a good point, is about how this will all play out, the buying and selling of virtual items, and how it has an effect on content control. They talked about media censorship in a game environment such as the Sims Online, so you've not only got economies being created virtually, you've got the idea of control developing. Who controls the items you obtain online? Who controls what you can say online? My guess would be that a self-regulated body controlled by a corporation has the right to censor any material, but who owns game-earned content?
Also, does this currency truly require its own place among currency tables? Probably not, because the games don't last long enough, they aren't stable currency. And it's doubtful there will ever be a currency transferrable between other economies. Maybe two companies could collaborate and use the same currency and have methods to transfer that currency. When we start seeing environments like this, that's when it'll really start to get interesting.
... just a couple days ago. (Our previous high sale was $800 for someone not quite in the top 10.) I think that's probably a record for a game without fancy 3D graphics. I should spend less time coding and more time playing. :)
(And then there's the players who think any mixing of RL with the game world is grounds for lynching. Heh.)
Online trading/selling of items has been occuring since the first account was sold on Ebay (Ultima Online) up to the formation of the Open Gaming Market (a currency exchange place for online game currency).
There have been people who have quit their normal jobs and took the "job" of play Diablo to make money. There's even been a court case for return of stolen in-game items.
It is a crazy world where currency in online games actually have more worth than the currency of some countries. I've personally sold virtual items for real life cash and I think people are crazy for paying what they do for these things, but then again I also can't understand why people pay large amounts of money for junk on E-Bay. I guess what they say is true, "one man's trash is another man's treasure", whether the trash is virtual or real. The online market just makes it easier to get those two people together.
a formative rl economy. It's unfortunate that Sony lucked into Everquest (i.e. Raph and Brad) as they've whipped the moneychangers in their temple several times, seemingly randomly, only to ignore it for years again afterwards.
It's nice that they're finally leaning towards considering the possibility of perhaps potentially shifting into the role of apparent decision-making in this regard, maybe.
I'm waiting for a digital futures market.
The more money everyone has, the less your money is worth.
I played FFXI for just the free trial month, and given the level limits etc. I guess I tend to agree that there isn't much value in auctioned money etc.
In EverQuest however most of the "old world" items have no level limits, so you can give your level 1 character what was, in the old days, the absolute best gear. Thus buying plat online is of great value. HOWEVER, you never get THE BEST. The BEST items currently are in the "Plane of Time" (ignoring recent expansion which I don't understand), and you have to play seriously just to get in there, or eBay a character that can.
Buying plat has ups and downs. The upside is that if you are a working stiff with a wife and kids, you can get your character decent enough equipment such that you can be useful to other people playing the game. Without such equipment many people will snob you out of their groups/raids/guilds/etc. I see it happen every day " can't tank for shit, her AC is 1000 and she can't hold agro", so they find someone else or make do with other strategies.
The downside is that buying plat makes this elitism problem WORSE because in some peoples minds there is no excuse for not having 1400 AC by level 52. Sucky equipment? Give yantis some money, he'll give you some plat. Secondly, the flood of plat coming in to the game drives prices sky high. Decent items right now sell for 100ks worth of platinum (100k plat is about $70 US). If you play legit, and do not buy plat online, that amount of money is essentially unattainable without spending a lot of time doing very boring things. Finally, I'm not sure how IGE gets the plat, but I can't help but shake the belief that Sony isn't getting a peice of the action, and that makes me mad.
This is the online equivalent of the mary sue problem, except that since EQ is largely a strategy/combat based game, if you're NOT a mary sue you are at a disadvantage.
This was brought up on a K5 article by Rusty at some point, think about it:
The only problem is that your ''dirty'' money has to be in a bank account to start with. Normally it's in cash, unless you have a serious sum that needs washing, in which case you'd risk distorting the online markets you washed your money through.
<disclaimer>I haven't tried this myself, and I don't suggest other people do either. But if anyone does, let me know how it goes :-)</disclaimer>
The child actor, DEN executive, and performer-of-unspeakable-acts?
The more money everyone has, the less your money is worth.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
First, you would have to determine if play time online can be quantified into an exact amount of real world money. Does playing 10 hours of Everquest yield enough virtual loot to justify paying someone 10 hours of game playing wages and have profit remaining?
If so, what about the notion of creating an offshore gaming "sweatshop" where you would pay 100s of *children* to play Everquest and then selling their online loot? Does having a group of 100s of online players focusing together cooperatively increase the yield of loot? If so, you could have supervisors/strategists who could coordinate the gaming efforts just so that the profits increase...
I thought I had read an article in Wired about this topic. Edward Castronova (an associate professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton) wrote a study about online economics and its possible effects.
Wired Article
The biggest issue of debate was wether or not the ability to get real money off of assets from these games could possibly grant your avatar certain Government protected rights. Silly, I know but what if you made your living off of online brothels and then your character gets kicked from the server? Where is your income now?
Though currently developers/publishers are protected from any recourse it'll be difficult to make sense of it all when these virtual economies become real and a corporation is the regulatory body of a contrived economic structure that effects the real world.
Personally, I think the biggest problem is 13 year old prostitues spamming you for DP or AM.
Its a matter of time. I enjoy playing MMOs, but I have a job and other interests. I don't want to spend 30 hours farming for cash. So I occasionally buy a bit, so I can do the things in game I do enjoy.
Really, at the base of it, its a flaw in the game. I shouldn't HAVE to put dozens or hundreds of hours into something boring and repetative in order to get what I need to do something fun. Time sinks like that only because the devs weren't able to add enough real content to the game.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
With a rather limited storage system, Sega's PHANTASY STAR ONLINE does it right. Veteran players don't benefit from keeping all the shzit they amass; healing items are cheap, but the best items can not be bought, they are obtained by defeating enemies, so money is worth little.
What to do? They just give their shzit away to the n00bs. This way, players concentrate on the fun part of the game: killing monsters - which PSO also did better than any other online RPG.
Game economics? Screw it! Do you play to ammass virtual money or to have fun? I mean, is your D&D character a warrior or a banker?!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I've played some games in Asian servers (e.g. Lineage II) and I made a few local friends who explained me several 'social dynamics' of the game.
The most noteworthy thing was that there were these clans of players who completely monopolized a dungeon or a given area (to get all the respawns monsters). And it was weird because usually clans left room for other people. I asked my virtual friends about it and they told me those were Chinese gangs, out there to make real money by reselling their items/characters on auction sites.
A lot of people were complaining because they couldn't get to the "good" monsters - if you tried to get too close you got PK'ed by one of them on sight.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
This is kind of the problems with these games. If I'm spending money just to play, I want it to be fun and worth playing even at the lowers levels. Sure, you can't do the same stuff the higher level people would, but there's no reason newbies shouldn't be able to enjoy the game until they level their characters up to a sufficient point.