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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.
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-
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!