virtual game economies

United States
July 6, 2007 3:06am CST
Without getting into specifics, I just want to point out that there is an absolutely HUGE market for currency trading within online virtual game economies. More generally, there is a market to use digital property transactions to drive real-world success. I'm sure many of you have heard of Second Life. I remember when I first read about the largest online transaction involving virtual property ever, and the medium it had occurred in was Second Life. Second Life is a unique virtual economy in that the notion of scarcity is not as prevalent. Rather, the economy of Second Life seems to be more user-defined. Oppositely, a game like World of Warcraft houses a virtual market determined by classic supply and demand + scarcity effects. I realize that some games, like world of warcraft, explicitly deny users the legal right to exploit the world of warcraft virtual economy via real-world transactions. Other games, for example, a couple of the games Sony Entertainment publishes, explicitly accepts users who want to use the virtual economy to drive real-world financial success. I have had some real world success via transactions that occur between a virtual game world and a merchant service like Paypal. The trick is to figure out the best contact information: once you find a market (that is, demand) for a particular aspect or property of an online game, find out the contact information of potential buyers and pursue whatever action is required to carefully and ethically provide those buyers with a valuable service.
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