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Legitimizing Real Money Trading In Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the ni-hao dept.

MMOGamer interviewed Andy Schneider, co-founder of Live Gamer, a company working with several major game publishers (including Acclaim, Funcom, and SOE) to legitimize the real money trading (RMT) industry in online games. Schneider expects this method of customer service to grow much more popular in the West over the next few years, especially after the success it's had in Asia. "It started in the very earliest MMOs, if not back in the MUD days in a very grassroots sort of way, but then obviously got into a more opportunistic and nefarious industry. When I talk about legitimate RMT, it's about a publisher supporting the notion that people want to buy and sell virtual items for real money, and they have decided to proactively support that notion and give their player-base a way to do that. ... It takes the manual process out of the equation that most players are engaged in with the black market, and reduces the fraud considerably, which is good for players. ... The reason there are gold farmers out there, the reason why there is nearly a two billion dollar secondary market for virtual items, is because of consumer demand."

3 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Can't see the point of playing a game open RMT by jmorris42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can see why losers would want to buy things they couldn't earn. I can see why the companies running the games would want to take the losers money instead of spending resources fighting gold farming. What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows buying their way to the top. And a game filled only with pathetic losers isn't likely to stay fun for even the losers for long.

    --
    Democrat delenda est
  2. No 3rd party needed. by ubungy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been playing this MMO for about 3.5 years (Entropia Universe, shamelessly) which was based on Real Cash trading/economy. There has always been a fixed exchange rate between U.S. Dollars and ingame currency (PED). Therefore everything you own in game has a real dollar value and can be sold in game. Real life funds can be transferred into the game, and withdrawn back to real life funds. This MMO has been around ~7 years with no 3rd party, nothing new here to me. In fact the parent company Mindark has just been granted a Swedish banking license. Yes maybe soon you can pay your real life bills in ingame currency. We aren't talking peanuts here either, we're talking real cash related to everything you do, so the best items in game fetch a pretty penny. The best healing tool in the game today you can fetch about 40,000 U.S. dollars for. You can buy plots of land in game for about the same that you can tax for real cash. Point is there are games that are based on real cash, and those who aren't. Those who arent it doesn't matter which way you go, private sales, E-Bay, Live Gamer, it's still all 'Black Market'. I'll stick with secure, non 3rd party solutions.

  3. It works for Second LIfe by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It works for Second Life. Almost too well. In 2007, Ginko Financial, an in-game bank, went bust. Then Midas Bank went bust. This drew the attention of The Wall Street Journal. In 2008, Linden Labs introduced bank regulation. Most of the Second Life banks were actually Ponzi schemes, with huge interest rates. It's still possible for a real-world bank to open branches in Second Life, but nobody has bothered.