Real MMO Item Profits From 'Play Money'

V_M_Smith writes "Showing it's possible to make real profits from 'play money' - Julian Dibbell set out to make a mint selling virtual goods on Ebay and elsewhere - and (at least for the last month) he succeeded. There's a story about the feat over at The UK Guardian and another over at Terra Nova, which explains Dibbell's 'year-long experiment in virtual item trading from the fantasy world of Ultima Online netted him, in its final month, a tidy profit of $3,917. Over the course of a year, that would be $47,000'."

Comments

Play money?

[obeythefist]

The question is, once you're trading instead of playing the game for fun, isn't it just like having a job anyway?

And for the people buying the virtual goods, isn't that like paying to "cheat" in the game?

Or is the game written in such a way that this is taken into account, and hence the whole point of playing the game is purely concerned with how much real world money you can spend on improving your character?

Re:Play money?

[anthony_philipp]

Well it seems it would be a lot like a job, especially if you have to play from 10 to 17 hours in it.
But i dont think the point of the game is to spend real money improving your character. It just happened to end up like that. what i find the most disturbing is the fact that some of these online worlds have higher gdp's than bulgaria. while bulgaria may not have that many people or money, its still a REAL country, not an imaginary one. I cant believe people spend *that* much money on this stuff.

Re:Play money?

[Beeswarm]

While it does seem a more than a little crazy to spend actual money to buy a virtual sword, it's got me thinking about how I might profit from it.

"But Dad, power leveling my Two-Headed Ogre for twelve hours a day is an investment!

Re:Play money?

[Tjebbe]

It is, but the point is (i guess) that it makes it possible to have a 'real' job in a completely virtual world, that has no use except entertainment (and now apparently to make money).

Makes you wonder a few things, does it count as a job for the law if you pursue this fulltime (i.e. are you officially unemployed in that case). And if so, is there any legal responsibility for the company that runs the servers? etc.

Re:Play money?

[AnwerB]

> Well it seems it would be a lot like a job, especially if you have to play from 10 to 17 hours in it.

Sure, at least until you come up with a good AI for it and run it on 10 accounts at once...

Re:Play money?

[AnwerB]

I wonder how much closer this brings us to Cyberspace in Niel Stephenson's Snowcrash, where peoples lives are almost as important to them in the online world as in 'meatspace'

Re:Play money?

[jmpoast]

The question is, once you're trading instead of playing the game for fun, isn't it just like having a job anyway?

If you can play for fun and still collect enough items to sell, then you are still playing a game, either that or you have a really good job.

And for the people buying the virtual goods, isn't that like paying to "cheat" in the game?

With these types of game in order for you to be up to par with the rest of the players out there you either have to sink a lot of time into it, or buy items. Buying items is a way for the buyers to be able to enjoy the game, without having to spend mind numbing hours collecting items/gold.

Or is the game written in such a way that this is taken into account, and hence the whole point of playing the game is purely concerned with how much real world money you can spend on improving your character?

No, it just ended up that way.

Re:Play money?

[*weasel]

He acted primarily as a broker. He bought items, he sold items. Whether he played for enjoyment in between is up in the air.

I don't believe he was selling any items he personally farmed, or buying/selling for the benefit of any particular in-game character.

He also contained all his trading to the UO economy. Having selected EQ, or even several of the 100k+ club - I'm sure he could have at least doubled that take.

It was an economic experiment to see if he could make more as a virtual property broker, than as a professional journalist.

As for buying items as a form of cheating-- that has been endlessly debated. External markets to in-game trading weren't a design consideration for UO. Though some people arguably are playing for profit, rather than fun.

Re:Play money?

[Cecil]

As best I've been able to figure, for some people, their style of play is fundamentally at odds with MMORPGs. Some people play a game because they want to feel they are the best, the strongest, the greatest, "teh winnar". In a MMO this is for almost all intents and purposes, completely impossible. There will always be someone out there who's higher level or has a better sword or completed such and such quest perfectly while you died halfway through.

For the small subset of these people who for whatever inexplicable reason refuse to just stop playing MMORPGs (typically because they have run into some personality conflict with some other player and have become determined to beat them in whatever way possible), they can see only one possible solution, and that is to buy your way to the top to preserve their enjoyment of the game. This, on the other hand, is feasable, because the sprawling majority of MMO players will never spend anything on buying third-party stuff, or sell it. They'll just trade it around in-game. Fewer still will spend more on third-party stuff than they spend on the game in the first place. So they merrily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy powerlevelling services, "uber" equipment, or even buy high-level characters outright. It is generally pretty easy to become one of the top 10 players this way, and voila, they're satiated.

I can't really explain it, as I don't understand it very well myself. But I've seen it time and time again, in numerous different MMORPGs.

Re:Play money?

[Carnildo]

what i find the most disturbing is the fact that some of these online worlds have higher gdp's than bulgaria. while bulgaria may not have that many people or money, its still a REAL country, not an imaginary one. I cant believe people spend *that* much money on this stuff.

The "GDP larger than Bulgaria's" number comes from figuring out how much money would be made if everyone in the game sold everything they got over the course of one year. The actual amount of money changing hands is much smaller.

Re:Play money?

[obeythefist]

Curiously, the market saturation for this kind of job is very high, because you really only need a few brokers like this and the entire userbase with money to burn would be well taken care of.

Perhaps these guys could make more money by using in-game messaging to advertise their services to all of the players? Continually? What they might have to do is insert words into their messages in case the admins block the legitimate advertising to get past the filters....

Perception of Value, Duh

[limekiller4]

From the article:
"The phenomenon of the online economies is symptomatic of the increasing age and maturity of players of interactive entertainment. According to calculations reported by Edward Castronova, an economics professor at California State University, people are taking internet games so seriously that since the beginning of the year, Category 1654 has racked up $6,404,668 in sales - real money spent on things that do not exist."

I kind of take umbrage at the notion that buying something intangible is a concept new to the advent of MMOs or even somehow novel.

What is art? It's about $20 worth of paint, canvas and wood, isn't it? Oh, it's arranged in a way that makes it worth $4.6mil? I see, so it's not the worth of a thing but the perception of worth, the interpolation of physical value with non-physical value?

So why is the selling of items that carry very real value to people surprising? Here is a simple rule! If more than one person values something, you have a market.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[anthony_philipp]

Here is a simple rule! If more than one person values something, you have a market.

why does it have to be more than one person?

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[Beeswarm]

Because if you only have one possible buyer, you won't have two people trying to outbid each other on Ebay.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[limekiller4]

anthony_philipp writes:
"why does it have to be more than one person?"

Because markets are created by a disparity between perceptions of worth. When a person sells a stock, for example, that person thinks it is in their best interest to sell it while another person feels that it's a bad idea to sell it and it's a good idea to buy it.

If you have only one person, you have no span. If you have no span you have no market because one person must have only one perceived value.

I did not take into account the possibility of that one person being a schizophreniac, however...

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[anthony_philipp]

you only need one person for an object to have value. an example is that of a family heirloom, no one else might want it, but it only has to be important to that one person to have value. and if they're rich the value may be quite high.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[limekiller4]

I originally wrote:
"Here is a simple rule! If more than one person values something, you have a market."

anthony_philipp asserted:
"you only need one person for an object to have value. an example is that of a family heirloom, no one else might want it, but it only has to be important to that one person to have value. and if they're rich the value may be quite high."

That's why I said it takes more than one person to make a market, not more than one person to have a value. My balls are pretty valuable to me but if nobody else wants them, there is no market.

...heyyyyyy...

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[anthony_philipp]

yeah, but if someone else has your balls, and you want them back, theres a limited supply, (presumably two) and a demand (you.) it doesnt mean that the person with your balls wants them a lot. it just so happened that they came about them, and now that you want them there is a market for them.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[limekiller4]

anthony_philipp writes:
"yeah, but if someone else has your balls, and you want them back, theres a limited supply, (presumably two) and a demand (you.) it doesnt mean that the person with your balls wants them a lot. it just so happened that they came about them, and now that you want them there is a market for them."

Once you've introduced someone else into the group -- the person who has my balls -- you have a market. If you have only one person, then that person still has their balls, don't they? If you then argue that they could be broken with a hammer, then you're still talking "value," not "a market," because the hammer is not in competition with me for them. And if they were, then we'd have a market again! =)

Look, I'm not going to keep replying until you get it. Markets are the result of a differential in the value inflection. If you don't have a span, you don't have a market.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[BenjyD]

Except that a piece of art is not entirely arbitrary - it requires time and effort to make. If they wanted to, the developers could produce any number of these items in effectively zero time and effort.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[limekiller4]

BenjyD writes:
"Except that a piece of art is not entirely arbitrary - it requires time and effort to make. If they wanted to, the developers could produce any number of these items in effectively zero time and effort."

I'll approach this on three fronts.

First, I'm going to guess you're young since your reply indicates you're probably not familiar with Warhol and his Studio 54. The point of Studio 54 was to mass market art. To, in effect, assembly line it and essentially make fun of the 80's art craze. On a side note, go see Basquiat . It's the most star-filled, incredible movie you've never even heard of.

Second, clearly the effort of art production is not commensurate with the price.

effort + raw materials != cost

Third, the central issue here is that the idea that an intangible item has hard currency value is novel. It isn't. Whether or not the people that maintain the software could effectively glut the market instantly only proves that the market is manipulatable. It does not speak to the "why" of the fact that the market exists in the first place.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[BenjyD]

I didn't intend to suggest that cost and effort were always related.

I guess it's similar to the "cardboard crack" Magic:The Gathering - the monetary value of the items/cards is maintained by an artificial rarity because the company only makes a few of the rare items.

It just seems silly to me - spending money on a game in order to avoid having to play the game.

But maybe I'm just bitter after wasting so much of my money as a kid on booster packs :(.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[Inexile2002]

Except that a piece of art is not entirely arbitrary - it requires time and effort to make. If they wanted to, the developers could produce any number of these items in effectively zero time and effort.

Which would have the exact effect of flooding the market with forgeries of a piece of art. If the developers for a game flooded the market with push button virtual swords, they would tank in value. Either they would break their own game and loose players or they would have to sell the mass produced swords for next to nothing.

Really, a virtual economy is in pretty much every way the same as a non-virtual one. Really it's not a "virtual" economy, it's an economy in a virtual world. The basic difference being that there are costs incurred in keeping the world running, and non labour costs of things in the games (ie the costs of the materials, costs of the virtual locations where they need to be built etc) are arbitrary. So in one game resources might be infinite, but not the labour to gather them. In another, resources might be scarce etc. It's still an economy, and since these virtual worlds touch on real ones, there is going to be trade. Hence non-virtual money for virtual items. Possibly even eventually virtual money for non-virtual goods or services.

Actually... here's a personal example. I used to play allot of pen and paper RPGs (I still would if I hadn't moved away from my players.) Once while at the bar a player lamented that he was really close to leveling and gaining a new power that he really wanted for the next session. I jokingly said, "Buy me a beer and I'll give you the experience." He promptly got up and bought me a beer. Then did the math and said, "So I can buy experience points for $4 a pop?"

I laughed and told him sure, but pointed out, "You are aware that I can just make up as many as I want." He didn't care and bought me a couple more beer "for the experience points". I had to put a stop to it because too many and I would have broken my own game, but I managed to get nicely drunk by selling nothing more than the right to mark down something on a piece of paper.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[ssand]

Unlike the items in a virtual world, Art takes time, dedication and skill to make. Each painting, or sculpture can be more or less unique, sure there are copies, but they are not worth it. In the virtual world, the item is replicated endlessly and not unique. Further more, most artwork does not go for 4.6 million.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[Lord_Dweomer]

This works with things other than experience. 2 examples. First, while I was DMing, people kept asking to bribe me for magic items. So I said that if people brought me sushi, they'd get to roll for a magic item.

Next session, I had 2 people bring me two full boxes of sushi, and thats not cheap!

Another time, one of the fairly cute girls in our group (yes, there are cute D&D chicks), was about to get horribly killed and yelled "I'll give you a blowjob if you spare me, PLEASE!"

Well, she said it as a joke, but later that week well, lets just say her character lived, and services were exchanged.

Re:Perception of Value, Duh

[Inexile2002]

I wanted to leave out the sex for in game favours stories, but if you're a DM and you've played with girls you're attracted to...

However, in my case I wouldn't really call that an economic transaction since all three times I've exchanged in game bonuses for sexual favours it was a pretext to doing stuff we hadn't figured out another way to initiate. And yes, I know, there are cute D&D chicks.

3K? Pshaw.

[Issue9mm]

That's nothing. A friend of mine (who will go unnamed) is a MUCH more skilled hacker than I am. Last year, before all the patching shut him out of business, he made almost $80k playing Everquest.

The beauty of it is that he wasn't playing 10-17 hours a day (as has been mentioned in this thread), but had a bot running that would literally play his character for him. All kinds of cheats were to be had, from decrypting the EverQuest packets as they came in to determine the location of hidden items and alert his character to their presence, to basically macroing repetetive profitable tasks, like building arrows from available parts, selling them.

Other cheats were written to facilitate the existing cheats, like the one where he could sell to merchant characters without having to actually GO to the merchant, etc.,etc... but the one thing that I learned, is that there are very sad people out there willing to pay for virtual EQ items.

Even better, after EverQuest patched him out of business, was that he still had a working cheat program that, while it wouldn't allow him to actually cheat for any profitable means, still allowed him to do some miraculous things (like transport his character to anywhere on the map instantly). When the virtual money dried up, he made real money selling his cheats to desperate EQers.

Long story short, it doesn't necessarily take being a dork to sell to dorks... you just have to be dork-smart.

-9mm-

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[jmpoast]

The only problem with that scenario is the cheats your friend was using are in violation of the EULA, making the money he made off the game ill gotten gains, and illegal to boot.

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[Issue9mm]

Depends on how you interpret the law I suppose, but you're mostly correct, I'll agree, and which is why I left my friend unnamed.

-9mm-

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[Bwerf]

It's definately against the EULA, which even forbids trading ingame items and chars for real money. Otoh I don't know if the EULA is enforceable in a court of law(whereever in the world your friend and buyers may be).

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[droleary]

there are very sad people out there willing to pay for virtual EQ items.

Uh, like the virtual characters they're paying for in the first place? Or the virtual effort spent in game otherwise doing rote things because the game playability doesn't scale? What is more sad, paying your friend for his "manufactured" arrows or actually wasting time manually making them?

Long story short, it doesn't necessarily take being a [x person] to sell to [x people]... you just have to be [x]-smart.

Edited, because that is really true in the general sense in all markets. To sell to people, all you have to do is understand what they'll pay for and find a way to supply it for less money, pocketing the difference. That your friend was able to take advantage of assembly line production instead of making everything "hand crafted" isn't surprising from a profit perspective.

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[Tofino]

I wouldn't call the virtual item buyers "sad". I picture these folks as having more money than time, and wanting to experience, say, the high level game in Everquest without having to go through the tedium of levelling their character to 60, plus AA, plus gear, etc. By spending a whack of cash, they can then get in game for a while to figure out how to actually play (you can spot these people a MILE away, level 60s who don't understand the concept of "proc"), and finally experience the end game.

No more sad than playing the game for hours a day in the first place in some people's eyes.

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[Anonymous Coward]

bingo. Against a EULA != against the law. At worst it's a breach of contract.

Re:3K? Pshaw.

[Lord_Dweomer]

I call bullshit on this story. You give no proof whatsoever, and you mention abilities that he had which would have set off alarms for the Verant staff monitoring the servers. While I know that cheating can be profitable in EQ, I think your story is a complete lie.

Not only that...

[Anonymous Coward]

But he could also claim unemployment benefits and pay zero taxes on his $47k

Not worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, the article states he spend 10 to 17 hours in the game per day. He made a profit of $3,917 in one month. I doubt he takes weekends "off" but I won't include them in this estimate...

If you average there are 22 work days in a month, he spends an average of 13.5 hours a day in the game, that's 297 hours in a month. He made $3917 in profit, for what boils down to a nice hourly wage of $13.19??

That is SO not worth it!

Re:Not worth it?

[Xenothaulus]

You're not looking at it correctly. He made $3917 doing nothing, just sitting on his (most likely fat) ass, and probably had fun while he was playing, at least most of the time. $13.19/hr (I won't bother to check your computations, as I do not math very well,) seems like pretty good pay when you think about it like that.

How much is a Jedi worth? $2450 and counting...

[JavaLord]

After reading this article I took a troll over to Ebay to check out what was up for auction. It appears someone is selling a SWG Jedi account for $2450 (current bid).

Now THAT is too much to pay for an account. While I could justify dropping like 100-200 dollars to buy something in a virtual world so I wouldn't have to grind, I couldn't see myself paying the price of a top of the line new computer for one.

It's not even a Jedi account, it's a Jedi Apprentice!

Lol. Poor, poor Bulgaria

[Serious Seth]

"Castronova's 2002 examination of genre leader EverQuest's virtual economy placed the fictional setting of Norrath as the 77th richest nation in the (real) world. By investigating the flow of currency and the cost of key items, he was able to determine that it had a higher GDP than Bulgaria."

Re:How much is a Jedi worth? $2450 and counting...

[Quill_28]

I agree, but if you had the money and not a lot of time but enjoyed playing these types of games...it might be worth it to buy the char instead of spending all that time building him up.

Re:How much is a Jedi worth? $2450 and counting...

[JavaLord]

I agree, but if you had the money and not a lot of time but enjoyed playing these types of games...it might be worth it to buy the char instead of spending all that time building him up.

I agree, I guess it all depends how much money you make. To me, I'd spend a days salary, maybe a few days on an account if it were super uber. I couldn't justify dropping a whole paycheck or more though. Especially since MMO character classes seem to get hit with the nerf bat often.

Diablo anyone?

[sweede]

This is posted on slashdot as if its something new and exciting. but people have been doing this in Diablo II since it was released. As another commented pointed out, it was done with EverQuest also. so big f-in deal if someone is making money playing Ultima Online.

Re:Diablo anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultima Online was released long before Everquest and Diablo. People have been selling virtual items for real money ever since the 80's when they were dialing into bbs's to play in their local MUD.

Re:How much is a Jedi worth? $2450 and counting...

[Quill_28]

I wouldn't spend a $1 on any char(unless i could resell), because I have neither the time or money to be playing these games.

But if I was young, single, and had extra money I would consider.

-1 redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sooo 1999. People were selling items for hundreds of dollars on Ultima Online and Everquest back then, too. BIG FRIGGIN' DEAL. We had accounts that sold on Ultima Online for upwards $5,000 before the duping bug made money worthless - in 1999!

I don't think this is news to ANYBODY.

Re:How much is a Jedi worth? $2450 and counting...

[Herkum01]

Well, I would not pay $2450 for a jedi account either, but that does not mean someone else wouldn't. It is alot of work to get to a Jedi and some people just don't want to have to go through that much work to get to it.

The Gaming Open Market

[Xenothaulus]

Here is a site that takes the concept a bit further. It's a "currency exchange" where you can buy and sell credits in various games. It's interesting to read through and see how the various game economies are faring.