Friday, April 16, 2004
Real profits from play money
The sale of imaginary goods
Basically, if you take part in some online games you can earn certain online things, money, weapons, castles etc. You can then sell these imaginary items for real money in the real world. There are people who do this for a living. One guy has figured out he can make around $50,000 a year doing it. There is also an economic model behind most of these games, supply vs demand etc, but this is the strangest fact I've seen yet:
"Castronova runs a weekly analysis of virtual world markets where he calculates hourly wages, totals spent and US dollar values of in-game currencies. This week's priciest item was a rare Jedi character account sold for $2,025. Castronova's 2002 examination of genre leader EverQuest's virtual economy placed the fictional setting of Norrath as the 77th richest nation in the (real) world. By investigating the flow of currency and the cost of key items, he was able to determine that it had a higher GDP than Bulgaria. "
Now tell me that isn't fucked up ;-)
Basically, if you take part in some online games you can earn certain online things, money, weapons, castles etc. You can then sell these imaginary items for real money in the real world. There are people who do this for a living. One guy has figured out he can make around $50,000 a year doing it. There is also an economic model behind most of these games, supply vs demand etc, but this is the strangest fact I've seen yet:
"Castronova runs a weekly analysis of virtual world markets where he calculates hourly wages, totals spent and US dollar values of in-game currencies. This week's priciest item was a rare Jedi character account sold for $2,025. Castronova's 2002 examination of genre leader EverQuest's virtual economy placed the fictional setting of Norrath as the 77th richest nation in the (real) world. By investigating the flow of currency and the cost of key items, he was able to determine that it had a higher GDP than Bulgaria. "
Now tell me that isn't fucked up ;-)
