Game Economics

i sold my everquest character and items for over $1500... granted that was over 10 months of my life pretty much down the drain, because alot of people who have never played that type of game do not understand the type of life comitment you have to have to succeed.. while i do feel that, under the right circumstances, your gettin a hell of a lot of game play for your 10 bucks a month, i still think that the developers should all customers to do what they want with their own items... granted they claim its their property, what they dont seem to connect is the fact that for every high level item that comes out of everquest, there is a real life person putting in hundreds if not thousands of real life hours for it....and the dynamics of the game make it so not all of that time is spent having "fun" ... i think real life transactions ruin the game economy, but so does letting in an endless supply of characters, money, and items... designing a game to require such a devotion of real life time to excel at should come at a small price, that being the players selling items out of game...

i really think its a matter of profit, the developers arnt gettin a share of this money made on ebay, but they also arnt sitting at home every waking hour playin the game for those types of items either... a GM with a greedy sttitude could make a fortune creating items and selling them online, im suprised the developers themselves havent caught on to this and followed suit

Project Entropia: http://www.project-entropia.com/it seems, plans on selling items of rl cash and will be encouraging players to do the same. Of course they'll be getting a piece of the action.
There will be no charge for the software or a monthly fee.

An article on it: http://money.cnn.com/2002/01/16/technology/column_gaming/index.htm
the folks on /. gabbing about it: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/26/2112248.shtml

this kind of activity is what lawyers have nightmares about. if all of these virtual items have real-world value, who's to say what happens when there's a database crash? should sony/verant be liable? they're not a bank/stock exchange, they can't and won't have the security of a bank, yet they're being treated like one. yikes.

this is probably why the companies themselves haven't gotten into this business yet. it's too much of a liability; if it's all under the table and done by 3rd parties (and actively discouraged by the game company), the game company can claim ignorance when something bad happens.

i can pull about 650 a week from EQ items being auctioned. Most people use www.playerauctions.com check it out if you want some examples of how much stuff goes for. I dont play all day, maybe just a couple hours a day if that and a bit on weekends. Im usually playing q3 or RTCW in the meantime. Once u get ur initial line of PP and items, its easy if you know how to trade, barter, haggle to keep yourself replensished for sales w/o going hunting too much. I also will purchase accounts to strip them individually and multiply my profits tenfold. Its not really farfetched. Pays those extra bills is all. If someone wants to pay for my fun, i wont argue with them.

If you don't think it can happen, here is some food for thought.

A guy I work with currently cleared $45,000 dollars this past year on selling everquest items and platinum. Before you discount this, let me set the stage for how he does it.

Joe (fake name of course) have 3 computers setup in a row on his large desk. Each machine is powerful enough to run the latest 3d game. Joe made a powerful character to start that would enable him to "twink" other characters to equal level. Joe (after months of work) created 4 different characters on 5 different accounts so that he can play them all at once. Joe then embarks on missions to get items that draw the attention of buyers. Joe spends all day trading and selling items in an area where people go to do this kind of thing.

After ebay was shutdown by sony, joe compiled a list of emails of his past buyers and also trolled boards for others so that he would have a large enough pool of potential buyers.

Joe now trades high level accounts around and sells stuff off them for profit in the transition time he has them. It is big money and a lot of work. I question if it is actually worth the effort, but he does it still.

okay, check my figures here please:

Castronova discovered that Norrath's gross national product per-capita is $2,266. [...] According to Sony, the game has 400,000 users in total

So, essentially, the gross nation product is USD$906,400,400

Actually the new Magic: The Gathering game is going to be selling virtual magic cards for real money apparently.

Seems sort of similar to this.

of course, certain unscrupulous developers have considered making uberitems and selling them on ebay...