Sony Online To Sell Virtual Property

OMG! writes "In an open letter to the community John Smedley, the president of Sony Online Entertainment, announced their new service 'the Station Exchange' which will allow players of Everquest II to trade their items for real live money. Sony Online is the first major player in the MMORPG genre to embrace commercial trading of in-game items." Commentary available from all the usual suspects, including Wired, the Players, Terra Nova, F13, and Grimwell. This would seem to be a total reversal of the policies of certain other MMOGs.

Holy Hell!

I jumped out of my chair when I saw this. My inital thoughts:

- This is going to legitimize the activities of companies like IGE [ige.com].
- I hope it's a unprecendented failure, even though I fear it won't be.
- What's next? SOE selling in-game currency?

At least they have the good sense to do this on new, seperate servers. This is going to have far-reaching consequences, they've essentially broken the "fourth wall" of MMORPGs. First-sign-of-the-apocalypse dept, indeed!

Re:Holy Hell!

Not unexpected. They're already charging for every little possible extra feature they can think of.. may as well try to get a cut from all those ebay sales as well.

Sony's gone cash-nuts. Like a Cookie Monster and a bag of Oreos.

Re:Holy Hell!

Only in front of the camera.. you should see him and Kirstie go at the munchies backstage...

Actually, Sony is the only one who can do it right

Smed says that 40% of their customer service calls are related to fraudulent in-game transactions. Sony could make this disappear instantly by creating an escrow system in-game. You have a sword to sell, you take it to the EQ Escrow storefront and drop it off. The buyer picks up the sword and the credits are automatically deducted from his account. No chance for fraud.

This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.

Re:Actually, Sony is the only one who can do it ri

This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.

Quite true. Obviously, no 3rd-party seller of in-game resources can survive being undercut by the system administrators, who can accomplish the equivalent of MONTHS of gil-farming with a single command-line.

However, although the short-term effect may seem beneficial, I've always thought that the legitimized (or merely widespread) sale of in-game items would hasten the collapse of any typical MMORPG. This seems to be a desparation move by SOE, whose EQ2 project has been eclipsed by WoW anyhow.

My thesis is that MMORPGs provide a substantial amount of their entertainment in the same way casino gambling does: the players' victories and rewards are quite arbitrarily handed out by the operators, but the cold-blooded arithmetic is hidden behind a screen of glamour and fun. Expose the honest real-dollars cost of an activity to the player, and they'll flee to a more fantastical game.

If a slot machine has a sign on it that each 10 minutes of play loses an average of $2.85, few people will enjoy pulling the lever.
If level 60 epic flame-armor has a "Buy Now" hyperlink which costs $14.31, few people will find it fun to camp a dragon every 3 hours hoping he drops one more of the pieces.

Basic psychological principles [wikipedia.org]: addiction can best be sustained if the game gives out rewards unpredictably. Game items are valued more because it was hard to know when they'd appear. Putting a blatant dollar-sign on the items is the ultimate form of predictabilty. The virtual Skinner box [nickyee.com] falls apart. When the mystique is gone, the players will be too.

PS. The Economist [economist.com] magazine agrees with my prediction, although the article isn't posted for nonsubscriber online reading.

Seems like it's closer to SecondLife's approach

The makers of Second Life [secondlife.com] have taken a very unique approach to player rights with in the game.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player [lindenlab.com] and not the company [lindenlab.com].This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency [lindenlab.com] to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia [project-entropia.com] does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest [sony.com], where Sony pretty much owns you.

Finally

"How much for your woman?"

For sale

So now when people say they have a bridge for sale, they might not be kidding?

Actually if you think about it, this is even better than software fees. Need money for the yearly employee bonus? Just make some pretend stuff out of thin air and sell as needed! Who said magic isn't real?

It's not out of *nothing*

There's no difference between trading virtual items and trading any tangible non-essential item. It's a basic economic process: you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).

There's a very good reason why realistic online games evolve this kind of trading. Never heard of people selling low-number Slashdot IDs? It's the same thing... people place a value on the virtual goods because they represent an investment in time that they cannot afford.

The obvious rules for virtual goods apply if these are to be traded usefully: a realistic supply (i.e. you can't resell the same item more than once), recourse against fraud, and a semi-official currency that allows abstract exchange.

No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex.

Re:It's not out of *nothing*

You missed the point of your parent post.

Sony gets a cut. They tax all the transactions. They make money turning virtual items into real items. Some items, yes, players will "work" for, but they are created out of nothing.

When you walk up to an NPC and slay him, he's got some loot on him. Couple coins, a skin, whatever. Where did that NPC come from? His spawn point. But wait, what was there before that...? NOTHING! So from nothing, comes something, comes loot, comes the opportunity to sell the loot for a profit, and be taxed in the process.

So when Sony wants to pump their revenues, they just introduce some no-drop floaty orb thingy that uses a special slot or whatever that *everybody wants* and can be gotten only by combining 8 of some special item that can be had via the station exchange for a dollar. That's $8 to make the whole thing. Some people won't buy all 8, maybe only 4 or 5. Let's say Sony's "nomincal fee" (which they do not specifically disclose; See here: http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/faq.vm ) works out to 25 cents per item. So the buyer spends $1, Sony takes $0.25, the seller gets $0.75. 400,000 people want this floaty orb and don't want to put time into getting the items, so they shell out $8 for them.

$2 on every $8 is 25%. 400,000 people buying 8 individual items for $1.00 each is 3.2 million dollars worth of commerce, of which $800,000 was created from thin air, and goes directly into Sony's pocket.

So you know that yearly bonus thing that your parent post mentioned? Think several hundred thousand dollars might cover it? Yeah, I think so too.

Printing money

You'd think they'd run into inflationary pressures if they essentially printed money.

Completely ridiculous

The things that go through SOE's collective heads... You know, murder is illegal, and people are still doing it all over. It's clogging up our court systems. How about we just make a state where you can murder whomever you want? We will just charge a special tax so we can make a profit off of it. If it just so happens to be your state that we decide to make murder legal in, it's ok, you can always move. You don't need your friends and family anyways.

Could be legal issues

Having been involved with some on-line "gaming" companies, I know that there are strict criteria differentiating games of chance from games of skill, and the former are highly regulated. If Sony is making a game where it's possible to win/earn actual money, and if Sony is going to profit from this, they're going to have a hard time:

1. Preventing people from hacking/gaming the system.
2. Making sure it's all skill and not chance.

I'll wager that this is a fiasco. Oops, I mean I suspect it will be. No gambling allowed on Slashdot...

The Death of Everquest II

By allowing (condoning, actually) this sort of activity, Sony is ensuring that this game dies a slow and lingering death. Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at Everquest was a good internet connection and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money will quit in disgust, and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough money to equip themselves well. Fortunately, those who don't want to participate in this mercenary practice will have the option to play on non-Station Exchange servers...that is, until a majority of the players on that server want the server to be a Station Exchange server...in which case you'll have to find another server...sorry.

It seems that Sony is turning on their major client base...risking alienation and mass defection...so why would Sony embraace such a controversial move?

From The Players:

SOE is charging a nominal, nonrefundable listing fee, plus a percentage of the final sale.

Ahh....that explains things.

That's right, Sony...bleed it dry.

Re:The Death of Everquest II

Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at Everquest was a good internet connection and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money will quit in disgust, and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough money to equip themselves well.

Hmm... let me rephrase that a bit.

...now you need the time, too. People with free time will be better equipped than people with no time...those with no time will quit in disgust, and those with time will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough time to equip themselves well.

So you're prefectly fine with paying for in-game items with time but think paying for them with money is a mortal sin..? Is it by any chance because you have more time than money?

You know what's going to happen...

...Poor players will have to work for their virtual items, while some punk kid will spend his paycheck on a +1,000 sword of n00bPower.

It makes sense to me to limit or ban this kind of trading/buying. What's the point of earning money and stats, if you can simply buy them?

Stop the press!

Poor people at a disadvantage to those with high disposable incomes! I can only hope that life doesn't imitate art or we could end up living in a world where the wealthy have access to the best homes, food, clothing, transport, education and health care! What a nightmarish vision!

second-hand experience

My roommate was addicted ("No, I just like it a lot! I swear!") to a MMORPG a few years ago and learned that you could sell your character on eBay. He worked some numbers and figured out that if he kept leveling up at his current rate, then within XX weeks he could get to an attractively high level and acquire enough good items to sell at $XX, and he would effectively get $1 an hour for failing grades, failing relationships, failing sleep patterns, and failing personal hygiene.

Amazingly, he decided not to bother.

Hrmm

So the rich get to stay on top even in games?

oh what fun that will be, my character can be a penniless student just like in real life.

Sony Is Smart

It's like on-line poker. People are going to do this and it's completely unregulatable and unstoppable, they may as well insert themselves into the process, give people a legitimate and legal way to do it, and make some money off it.

I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing Sony gets a percentage cut of all items traded on the Station. And even if they don't, it's generating traffic and thus ad revenue.

I mean, WHOA! RIAA! Look at this! Somebody had customers doing illegal things with their property in violation of their license agreement and found a way to make a profit off it instead of sueing their own customers! What a novel friggen concept.

Dear Sony...

Thanks for making me the offer of parting with my money in order to buy something from your online not actually real game called Everquest.

However, I am already buying enough tangible shit from Sony like Michael Jackson & Jessica Simpson CDs without needing to spend any more with you.

At least with the tangible shit, I have something to throw at the cat or at the TV screen when I realise you guys have ripped me off again.

Regards

Blah blah blah

Good, but strange for Sony

It makes sense from a customer satisfaction point of view to give customers what they want.

If people want to give real money to buy imaginary items, they should be able to do so. I wouldn't do it, because I don't see what value I would be getting, but if others feel differently, more power to them.

I am surprised that Sony is doing this, though, because they have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot with propriatery standards and a sometimes control-freakish mentality which makes some of their hardware less desireable than it would otherwise be.

It's almost like someone with a different (non-Sony) mindset approved this decision.

Two issues

There are two issues with Sony actually doing something like this:

1) They are accepting responsibility for the value of in-game items. This might not seem like a big deal, but god forbid a server rollback takes a big-ticket item out of your inventory. Or worse, balance adjustments devalue rare/valuable items. How many lawsuits can you imagine will come from people who want to be reimbursed for their "virtual" property's market value? To be sure, the items in question are really just bits on a computer. But really, how different is that from most banking done today? Would you like to be told by your bank that your last direct deposit doesn't exist anymore because they needed to rollback their database?

2) Officially putting a value to in-game items gives new incentive to all those gold and item harvesting shops to work extra hard, not only to eat up as much of those resources as possible, but to hoard and control market fluxuations. If you think spawn camping is bad now, imagine when you're competing with people who are doing it for a living! Yes, it's already happening now, but this will just take it to levels untold of before.
Will there be an SEC to make sure collusion doesn't take place between harvesters and GMs who spawn an extra rare or two for a few bucks?

A Messag From Sincere Busines Partner

Hello and may all the Gods of Everguest Bless Yuo!

I am writing because I know that yuo are a sincer and honest person who will hep out a preson in need.

My Everquest cahacter MINOLLY WEATHERALL was sadly kilt in a server crash leaving behind an account of $70,000,000 SEVENTY MILLION AMERICN DOLLARS with no claimant accessible.

If you wil assist me with your Everquest cahracter to recover this money I wil give you 15% plus expenses

This is a sincer offer and I know I can trust you with this verry sensitiv informations!

in unrelated news

golden tee live (a new version of a popular bar-video-golf game) just recently added some new features including paying-for-virtual-property, such as different club-sets or even boxes of golfballs which you DO lose as you hit them into the water.