Interesting Read: Selling MMORPG Goods in Real Life
I found this to be a pretty good read, though it was odd that IGE was willing to be quoted, while major MMORPG makers fell under the "Not available for comment" category (aka: "We don't wanna talk about it" :p ) The last quote below really got a "whaaaa?" from me. :\
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,66074,00.html
Quote:
"The secondary market continues to grow exponentially," said Brock Pierce, CEO of IGE, one of the largest secondary market trading companies. "Someone will always be there, because someone else is willing to pay for it."
The problem, say some virtual world experts, is that many players see the objects they earn or build through countless hours of play as property. And property has value.
"In cases where the users' contribution to the game constitutes a new intellectual property or new content," said Philip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life developer Linden Lab, "I'd say it makes no sense and is probably indefensible to claim that you can't traffic in those products and that those products have no inherent value."
Quote:
"They can stop in-world transfers completely," said Dan Hunter, an assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "If you do that, you have a completely different property system than you have now, where only that which you have is yours.... That goes against our expectations of capitalism."
Quote:
Publicly, the Blizzards and Sony Onlines of the world say these virtual worlds are role-playing games and that the users want the games to be about play, said Hunter.
"If you talk to them in private," he said, "they will accept, or at least start to tell you, a significant number of the power players -- the guys they count on to drive the world -- if you didn't allow the transfer of these things, they would just head off into another (game)."
