The Players Corner Archive

The link is to a New York Times story in the Technology section that is mostly about Ken Seldon's lucrative business of selling items for cash.

Although this isn't news to any of us, and (surprise) I don't really have a huge amount of heartburn about it, what IS interesting is Neil Harris' (Simu's executive VP) non-comments.. "We don't support it.. If players really want something, they're going to get it."

Seems that the "We're going to wait and see what happens to the EQ case" stance has morphed into the "We really can't do anything about it" stance. Which is okay, too...but if that's the case, and we're going to argue that Premium auctions take too much GM resources off the table for other projects, why can't we have another Foehn's Promise, which pretty much amounted to a cash raffle for items?

After all, if Ken's making $100k a year in the aftermarket...wouldn't it be prudent for Simu to get a piece of the action? It's their code and their game, after all.

Ylena
(musing) reg

quote:

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Originally posted by Ylena:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/technology/circuits/28TRAD.html

The link is to a New York Times story in the Technology section that is mostly about Ken Seldon's lucrative business of selling items for cash.

Although this isn't news to any of us, and (surprise) I don't really have a huge amount of heartburn about it, what IS interesting is Neil Harris' (Simu's executive VP) non-comments.. "We don't support it.. If players really want something, they're going to get it."

Seems that the "We're going to wait and see what happens to the EQ case" stance has morphed into the "We really can't do anything about it" stance. Which is okay, too...but if that's the case, and we're going to argue that Premium auctions take too much GM resources off the table for other projects, why can't we have another Foehn's Promise, which pretty much amounted to a cash raffle for items?

After all, if Ken's making $100k a year in the aftermarket...wouldn't it be prudent for Simu to get a piece of the action? It's their code and their game, after all.

Ylena
(musing)

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That's funny, some guy makes 100k a year selling gemstone stuff. Too funny. With all these layoffs that wouldn't be a bad job change should something happens...

(Sarcasm)

[This message has been edited by Dustin Brookthorn (edited 03-28-2002).] reg

Very intersting stuff.

Something tells me Ken Seldon is Ciston.

Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money

By MARC WEINGARTEN

[L] OS ANGELES -- KEN SELDEN is having a red-letter month selling goods on the Internet. He has unloaded about 400 million pieces of silver, a sanctified claymore and a lot of women's clothing, among other things. His total take is about $9,000. But the merchandise is strictly digital, nothing more than words written on a computer screen.

Mr. Selden is a mighty financial force for the roughly 20,000 players of GemStone III, an online swords-and-sabers role-playing game in which thousands of people gather daily to interact in a medieval domain. The goal is to advance your character, or avatar, accumulating virtual wealth and new armor by hunting monsters, raising the dead or opening boxes of treasure.

Players can advance more quickly by using potent weapons that make their avatars stronger. And for those who lack the time or patience to acquire the goods within the game's confines, Mr. Selden provides an answer in the material universe.

Buying up merchandise and virtual currency from those abandoning the game, Mr. Selden resells the goods to eager players, often for a handsome profit. In doing so, he has established an exchange rate between game currency and the dollar, emerging within the GemStone subculture as equal parts Alan Greenspan and J. P. Morgan.

"Half the people thought I was ruining the game," he said, "and the other half thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever seen."

Mr. Selden is not the only entrepreneur capitalizing on Web gamers' lust for hard-to-obtain virtual merchandise. Bustling real-money markets thrive on bulletin boards and sites including playerauctions .com, devoted to popular role-playing games like Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest.

What makes GemStone III unusual is that unlike the new generation of role-playing games like EverQuest, with their elaborately matrixed 3-D renderings of virtual worlds, GemStone is a low-tech, text-only game whose merchandise exists only as descriptions, along with the coding that makes them functional ? not images. (The game, which costs $12.95 a month, is at www.play.net.) Everything ? a "4X blessable ax with extra silvery cobwebs across the blade," a "6X exceptional padded breastplate" ? is an imaginary construct. Still, game players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for vestigial goods. And more often than not, the seller is Mr. Selden.

Mr. Selden, a 43-year-old father of three boys who lives in Studio City in the San Fernando Valley, said his profit from selling items on GemStone III had allowed him to take a sabbatical from his career as the writer and director of such films as "White Lies," starring Rosanna Arquette, and network movies-of-the-week. A Cleveland native and Yale graduate, Mr. Selden said he had made close to $100,000 last year selling goods to fellow GemStone III players, and that this year looks promising as well.

Mr. Selden's customers tend to be older professionals who lack the time to play for 10 hours at a stretch and who use their real-money acquisitions as a shortcut to keep up with the hard-core contingent.

GemStone, one of the first multiplayer online games, was introduced in 1988 as a feature of General Electric (news/quote )'s online service, Genie. Players paid $2.95 an hour at night and $11.95 an hour during the day. "At that point about 30 people, including me, were playing the game," Mr. Selden said. "When people left the game for good, usually to sign on to EverQuest, they would try to recoup the money they spent by selling the items they had accumulated." Mr. Selden, an armchair economist whose first job out of college was building economic forecasting models for a company called Data Resources, kept a close watch on those auctions, looking for trends.

When Mr. Selden observed a bidding war for a piece of armor in which the asking price quickly ballooned from $500 to $9,000, he realized that the prices were arbitrary. So in 1998 he decided to buy a "dead account" ? one left dormant after someone permanently logs off the game ? for $2,500. Using the items acquired from the account, Mr. Selden held two auctions: one inside the game, where players could bid with silvers, the virtual currency, and another outside the game, for cash.

"I discovered that people tended to pay the same amounts inside the game as they did out of it," Mr. Selden said. This was a crucial revelation, as it allowed him to determine an exchange rate, which he estimated at $65 per million silvers. The rate quickly became the lingua franca of GemStone III's marketplace. Using this rate, he sold all of the items from the dead account and made a $5,500 profit.

Mr. Selden kept acquiring dead accounts and selling the items individually until he had become the wealthiest player in the game. Now he functions as a kind of high-end warehouse for GemStone III players. Because GemStone III is a vintage game, some items have become rarities, and Mr. Selden has just about all of them. He also has three sales representatives who hawk some of this merchandise within the game for commissions.

Simutronics, the Missouri-based company that runs GemStone III, is aware of Mr. Selden's thriving business. But the company, which advocates a level playing field for the game, holds that selling fake goods for real cash distorts the spirit of fair play. "We don't in any way support this sort of thing," said the company's executive vice president, Neil Harris. But Simutronics does not try to prevent players from buying items. "It's a simple case of supply and demand," Mr. Harris said. "We do our best to maximize the skill element, but you can't legislate it away. If players really want something, they're going to get it."

Other game companies have been less permissive. In January of last year, Sony (news/quote) Online Entertainment, which runs EverQuest, prevailed on eBay (news/quote) and Yahoo (news/quote ) to cancel all auctions of EverQuest items, asserting that the transactions were a violation of the game's end-user licensing agreement, which states that Verant Interactive, a Sony subsidiary, "shall retain ownership of all intellectual property rights."

"From the player's standpoint, I can understand that there's an eminent domain issue, which is basically, `I produced the goods, so I can do what I want,' " said Edward Castronova, an associate professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton who has written a paper on EverQuest called "Virtual Worlds: A Firsthand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier." "But the game runners have a public-goods argument. They need to create an atmosphere of play for the collective good, and if they allow the buying and selling of items, that collective good could be ruined."

Meanwhile, Mr. Selden dreams of the day when he can become the Federal Reserve of all Internet games. "I want to create a cross-game currency exchange," he said. "I'm actually working on a site now with a few people. But I don't know the other games as well as GemStone. Guess I'll have to start playing them." EverQuest players, lock up your safe-deposit boxes.

[This message has been edited by LordKranar (edited 03-28-2002).] reg

"I don't play gemstone anymore, I play paypal."

Mike reg

- Lord Kranar, human Archwizard reg

Sonic reg

quote:

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Originally posted by Alfador:
Ciston bought out most of the oldschool players accounts like Dart and Thailor. The market ballooned up since they left and he's left with a hell of a profit to people who are willing to buy stuff.

Sonic

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There's so many names that it's literally a joke

Actually...

The strangest thing is that GM Zamperon aka Kodos (1st legend wizard)...his wife named Ruriko (Half-elf cleric) actually held an auction on the boards about 3 or 4 years ago selling things for RL cash out in the open. Thought that was pretty cool :P
reg

quote:

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Originally posted by Omnirus:

The strangest thing is that GM Zamperon aka Kodos (1st legend wizard)...his wife named Ruriko (Half-elf cleric) actually held an auction on the boards about 3 or 4 years ago selling things for RL cash out in the open. Thought that was pretty cool :P

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I remember this. They didn't hold it on the boards so much, but I think they posted a link or posted for requests on the mailing list. I remember that I felt sorta bad because Ruriko asked me to assess some items for her and then I realized later they were being sold for cash. Some friggin nice items too.

Leslie

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Smell that shoe! reg

And thank God for Ciston, without his merchantry, we would not have the beautiful TV sitting in our living room today

Ta da

Love ya Cis!

reg

Sonic reg

Wow, that kinda makes me feel good, that axe you are mentioned was mine and i had it altered. Please don't think i'm an idiot, it just made me smile.

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Spidr reg

But, Simu is still benifitting from this. Items are still being made and put into the lands by a few GMs. Which you know the company already knows. Just curious who all is getting a split of the profits.

edge reg

~The Artist Formerly Known As Onyxflame reg

Heh, I can just imagine how nice and big that TV must be. -grins-

Hey, how do you think I attend all these 'Cons? Simu funded! (somewhat) =P

- Pudgee

[This message has been edited by Pudgee (edited 04-02-2002).] reg

Hey! That is pretty cool!

"Yeah! My 10x ultra weapon was feature in the New York Times!"

- Lord Kranar, human Archwizard reg

However, it should be, and will likely become illegal. What is the person selling? I've heard it all . . . from time spent on developing the character/items, to 'access' to the account. I wonder if these same people try to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to tourists. Basically, it all comes down to them selling something that is not theirs.

Nine-tenths of the law is possession . . . well, who has possession of said virtual item? Simple, turn off the server, in any game, and where is the item. Can the seller of the item still sell his/her item now? If it is truly theirs to sell, then no problem, right? Heck, if it was truly theirs to sell, why not just turn the power back onto the server and make their item reappear? This question of virtual item ownership is just ridiculous and a huge waste of courtroom time. Why the judge just doesn't laugh the case out of existence is beyond me.

I just hope that this article posted in the NY Times will finally get some folks, see as IRS, interested in this sort of dubious activity.

So, congratulations on your 15 minutes of fame, it'll be up soon. Federal Reserve of Internet gaming . . . right. I think reading the article made me laugh more than anything else. Nearly as bad as the family trying to sue Sony because their son committed suicide and was an avid player of Everquest. Yes, playing Everquest was the reason he killed himself. Only worse than these cases are the lawyers who try to make money off such idiocy. My only question is: Where the hell were the parents? Maybe Sony should sue the parents for being incompetent and unfit role-models.

It's the American way now: Why work when you can sue or sell off something that's not yours? I'd say our society is so complacent and soft we'd make the Pillsbury Doughboy look tough.

As for the comment about the company making money from Ken's sales. Please, how about you get off the "I must make this company look bad any chance I can" trip and think. If they wanted to make money off items, they'd just sell them themselves like other MUDs do.

Pat yourself on the back for having a shiny new TV or whatever because of this sort of thing too. I just hope you never have anything of your own work you wish to sell and then have someone else sell it as theirs. Then again, you'd be on it and making some off the top too, right?

Ladeda reg

But I believe the Teary Crystal chick meant that as a result of her disgust with this whole buying/selling business, she and her mate are playing less and doing other things more - including buying a new TV and enjoying each other's company by watching it together.

Or - maybe they sold off some neato kewl things and used the proceeds to buy the tube. I'm pretty sure she meant the former, however.

R
reg

quote:

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Originally posted by LaDeDa:

I just hope that this article posted in the NY Times will finally get some folks, see as IRS, interested in this sort of dubious activity.

Ladeda

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People keep bringing the IRS thing up as if that's the magic bullet that will somehow "bust" RL Item sellers.

Take Ken . . the guy is smart enough to create a meta-game economy, make upwards of 100K a year buying and selling virtual items and went to Yale .. You think he's gonna have his earnings published in the NY Times and NOT report it to the IRS as income?

Trust me ... he's on the up-and-up as far as that goes. It's called Misc. Income.

-Prestius reg

quote:

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Originally posted by LaDeDa:

As for the comment about the company making money from Ken's sales. Please, how about you get off the "I must make this company look bad any chance I can" trip and think. If they wanted to make money off items, they'd just sell them themselves like other MUDs do.

Ladeda

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I love these one shot wonders... log in... flame.. then fade away...

[This message has been edited by IceAgeThief (edited 04-04-2002).] reg

quote:

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Originally posted by Desharei:
I'm not positive, so correct me if I'm wrong Crystalnoggin...
R

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You're wrong cause that wasn't me who wrote that. It was Rhain so we'll have to see what Rumdrop has to say about that. (However I think you're right because that's how I interpreted it.) reg

quote:

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Originally posted by IceAgeThief:
I love these one shot wonders... log in... flame.. then fade away...

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Let's try not to fan a flame with another flame please. Everyone has to start somewhere so assuming he signed up just to post doesn't make him a "one shot wonder". As if only the "one shot wonders" are the ones who do the most flaming around here. reg

Oh, and Ice. If the trend of the poster's post I quoted about money making wasn't always slanted toward the company they hate, then I would agree with you. I haven't read here long, but I have read enough to know the feelings this person has for a game I don't think they even play anymore.

This was the only topic that caught my attention, because it affects the other games I play.

Ladeda reg

quote:

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Originally posted by LaDeDa:
However, the source of this misc. income is rather shady.

Oh, and Ice. If the trend of the poster's post I quoted about money making wasn't always slanted toward the company they hate, then I would agree with you. I haven't read here long, but I have read enough to know the feelings this person has for a game I don't think they even play anymore.

Ladeda

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The selling of virtual items from one player to another player has not had any legal presidence so it leaves the definition "shady" as speculative.

I can say without a doubt I know the feelings of the poster far better than anyone else here, and the intent about Simutronic's making money off this particular topic is how I described.

All that aside, welcome to the boards and ignore the mud flying around in here. It tends to get a bit thick at times. reg