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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.
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.
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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.)
The tax system is pretty much a joke anyway. If you want to read a good book about how bad our tax system is, I highly recommend a book called Perfectly Legal. It basically points out how bad it's really gotten. I doubt the IRS is going to audit your EQ account, let alone audit you. They pretty much can't afford to audit most people anymore. Which is probably one reason we have a deficit.
That's the point I was slyly trying to make. If a person ever got to the point where they were making enough money off of EverQuest trading to actually pay the bills, the IRS would want to tax that as income.
But doesn't that mean that if I dump a load of money into trying to build an on-line EverQuest venture which can produce enough money to live on, I can claim those expenses <losses> as a tax deduction?
I'm pretty sure I can claim those losses for trying to build a business selling ice cubes to eskimos (or something just as stupid) so why not if I legitimately believe I can get rich playing my faviorite on-line game.
Of course, I'd have to start paying taxes if I ever turned a profit....
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
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.
Online trading/selling of items predates Ultima Online by quite a bit.
I remember playing a MUD around 1994-ish.
The administrators would sell "uber" items (you'd just send them a check) and when players got tired of their characters they would try to auction them off to others.
I'm sure this sort of thing was done on BBS door games and the like as well, so finding the "first" would probably take a while.
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>
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.
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