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Perhaps the makers of virtual worlds shouldn't be so persnickety about allowing players to exchange real money for virtual goods.
In a report set to be released Wednesday, Sony Online Entertainment has concluded that so-called real-money trades can be good for both gamers and publishers if handled at controlled locations such as Sony's own Station Exchange, a 1-year-old experiment to make transactions of virtual goods for real money a direct part of EverQuest II rather than an illicit activity.
The report could finally put hard data to the growing real-dollar market for virtual goods such as weapons, armor and currency in Ultima Online, World of Warcraft and City of Heroes.
Most game makers ban the sale of their games' assets for real money. As a result, the so-called real-money trade of those goods has mostly been limited to third-party sites like eBay and Internet Gaming Entertainment. Those sites don't share their data, making it difficult to put a hard figure on the size of this secondary market, which some believe could be as big as $1 billion annually.
"We've never had reliable data on this phenomenon at all," said Edward Castronova, a leading expert on the economies of online games and a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University.
Sony Online Entertainment's study is the first big step toward ending the mystery. Equally important, Sony execs said the admittedly limited experiment showed that a game publisher's exchange can make real money at little expense to the company while reducing customer complaints.
During the last year, Station Exchange ran on two of more than 30 EverQuest II servers, allowing players to conduct so-called game asset transactions for real money. Sony Online earned $274,083 from its listing fees and commissions on the 51,680 transactions conducted in the first year. While that's hardly a fortune, it cost Sony Online almost nothing to run the service.
Also among the study's highlights was a finding that bringing real-money trading in-house reduced fraud, so the time Sony Online customer service representatives spent handling virtual-goods transaction disputes dropped from 40 percent to 10 percent of the total time spent on calls.
Sony Online execs believe the experiment's results validate their exchange-friendly take on virtual property.
"I'm a big believer that this whole virtual property thing is a big part of the future of online gaming," said John Smedley, Sony Online's president. "So it's about time to shed some light on the facts, rather than the fiction."
The report also indicated that behavior on the Station Exchange EQ II servers didn't differ materially from that on servers not running the service. That conclusion suggests that players will traffic in the market for virtual goods whether it is sanctioned or not.
"While it is difficult to gather authoritative and accurate data" from third-party real-money trading sites, the report said, "a simple comparison of current prices for basic items shows that sales prices on Station Exchange and third-party auction services are about equal."
To Castronova, the fact that the virtual-goods market appeared to be about the same on and off the Station Exchange servers was a surprise. "This is a little disappointing," said Castronova, who has traditionally opposed such trading because it goes against the rules of most games. "I was hoping that the other servers would have less (of the trading). But that didn't happen at all."
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5 years ago, the profit margin of RMT business used to be unbelievable high (nearly 80 percent) when some pioneers put their virtual items on eBay for trading the real money. Many people just left after making a fortune from selling virtual items and some stayed. Those who stayed created several virtual item exchange services, allowing gamers to buy and sell in-game currencies, items, and even accounts.
When more and more gamers got tired of tedious monster-killing type of power leveling work and were willing to buy virtual item in real money in order to better enjoy gaming experiences, many new companies (such as Thsale.com, Swagvault.com and Itemrate.com)joined the RMT business. Like any other businesses, since then, the profit margin dropped down immediately because of the competition and the battles between those middlemen were never ending.
IGE, a leading services provider to the MMOG community, best known for its virtual item exchange services and its interesting M&A stories, used to be the dominated player in the RMT market. Like IBM in the computer hardware and service industries back to early 90?s, IGE had almost 60 percent RMT market share and its monthly revenue ever reached $9 Million in 2006, more than the combination of the latter comers such as Thsale.com, Swagvault.com and Itemrate.com.
However, things have changed since 2007. For the managing problem and its historical debt issues, IGE started to quickly lose its market share in RMT market. There have been many lawsuits against IGE and its management team. Somehow they stopped to pay millions of dollars virtual items payment to their suppliers after receiving the virtual goods since February, 2007. As a result, many suppliers had to wait at IGE?s Shanghai office everyday asking for the money they deserved. In April 2007, Brock Pierce, the founder of IGE left the company and the company was sold out to Atlas, a company founded by several previous share holders of Affinity Media, the parent company of IGE. The first thing Atlas needed to deal with was to pay back the debt IGE left over.
Since then, the new IGE could never gain the trusts back from their suppliers and customers. Its Shanghai office was shut down in a few months and its Chinese website (the major channel to get suppliers and their virtual currency and items) was removed thereafter.
At the meanwhile, Thsale.com and Itemrate.com have taken over the market shares IGE left. After acquiring Itemrate.com, Thsale.com now becomes the largest provider in the RMT business. With 300+ employees all over the world, Thsale.com seems to be the most trustful and reliable service provider in the North America and Europe.
However, Thsale has not reached the level IGE ever achieved yet although it seems they do have the potentials. They need to make sure they won?t repeat IGE?s failure. After several years? competition, only a few companies survived. Besides the tight market competition, MMORPG developing companies will be continually working against the RMT market. Only those who can provide better, faster and more reliable services to both buyers and sellers can finally stay.
It is survival of the fittest in the RMT market and you never know what?s going on. Maybe at the end of the day, the game developing companies and RMT providers will work together to explore this multi-billion dollars business. Until now, the battle is continuing.
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