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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'."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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-
But he could also claim unemployment benefits and pay zero taxes on his $47k
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!
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!
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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.