eBay Delisting All Auctions for Virtual Property 324
The growing popularity of Massively Multiplayer games has brought the issue of ownership rights in virtual worlds, and the appropriateness of what is called 'real money transfer' (RMT) into an increasingly public light. The success of the company IGE, as well as the launch of Sony Online Entertainment's 'Station Exchange' service would seem to indicate that RMT is now an acceptable part of Massive gaming. The well-known auction site eBay has recently made a policy decision that may throw these assumptions into a different light. Following up on a rumour that's been going around I spoke today with a media representative for the company, who confirmed that eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site. This includes currency, items, and accounts/characters; not even the 'neopoints' used in the popular Neopets service is exempt from this decision. Read on below for the company's rationale for this decision, and a few words on the impact this could have on future RMT sales.
Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained that the decision to pull these items was due to the 'legal complexities' surrounding virtual property. "For the overall health of the marketplace" the company felt that the proper course of action, after considerable contemplation, was to ban the sale of these items outright. While he couldn't give me a specific date when the delistings began, he estimated that they've been coming down for about a month or so. Mr. Durzy pointed out that in reality, the company is just now following through with a pre-existing policy, as opposed to creating a new one. The policy on digitally delivered goods states: "The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner." Given the nebulous nature of ownership in online games, eBay has decided the prudent decision is to remove the possibility for players to sell what might be the IP of other parties via their service. Mr. Durzy made it a point to say that initial listings of virtual property would not have punitive actions. Their assumption, he said, is that most users break with policies because they're unaware of them, rather than maliciously. Initial infractions will result in a delisting of items, and an attempt to educate the user on the policy. Persistent disregard for the policies, of course, will result in a removal of the seller's account.We've spoken before on the possibility of taxation of virtual goods in the U.S. and abroad, as well as the economic impact these sales can have. With the removal of a very popular, very public source of virtual currency and goods from the market, what does this mean for the future of RMT? Will small businessmen who previously worked via eBay now turn to larger independent sites like IGE? Given that eBay is ipso facto declaring virtual goods to be the property of the game makers and not the players who 'earn' them, what does this mean for the future of virtual rights in general?
Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Examples:
- "level 60 epic gear warrior for sale" => "leveling services to get you a epic gear warrior"
- "5000 gold on Thunderlord" => "the five days of playing time it takes me to get you 5000 gold"
- "1337 item" => "time it took me to farm this item and give it to you"
I mean, are they safe guarding against this also? Because, in the end, what's wrong with selling people your time or services to them? Once they complete the service, you pay them. I don't know how they could find some way around this or tell which auctions for services need to be revoked.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I'd thought better of them than this...eBay sells so many things of purely subjective value, you'd think that some policy maker on the inside would have cottoned to the fact that value is a fairy tale, and that their business is to make money off people's experiment
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not eBay being stupid, but it's not what they're saying it is either. If eBay thought they could make money providing this service, they would. The real reason is that the associated costs and risks exceed the profit available from these transactions. I'm sure that internally they have statistics that show the rates of disputed transactions, and the administrative costs of dealing with them along with the cost of liability insurance for the potential litigation associated with these transactions. They compared those numbers with the projected revenue and one side won.
This isn't a philosophical issue, or eBay trying to prevent anything. Companies don't work that way (usually). This is almost certainly purely economic.
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I mean no disrespect to ivan here, but the idea that decisions a large company makes are typically based on risk analysis, balancing potential profit and risk, is not exactly something that anyone should view as insightful.
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Parent took the GP's misconception of how and why economic decisions are made (that is, the idea that what the rep says has anything to do with why the decision was made) - and explained what was likely the real reason this decision was made.
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:4, Insightful)
The truly ironic thing here is that you are dismissing the original poster for making a comment that you view as so obvious it shouldn't be marked insightful, yet the original comment isn't even valid. That is how a large company works in the theoretical, academic model. In reality, any sufficiently large corporation is governed by petty egos and politics and therefore any particular decision may or may not make any economic sense. Like police, economics is a corrective force, not a preventative one, once group dynamics are considered.
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eBay policy: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/vero/ [ebay.co.uk]
Neopets ToS: http://neopets.com/terms.phtml [neopets.com]
#5
* requests for money by using your Neopets, Neopoints or any other Neopets property on third party sites or your personal websites (including Ebay)
In my opinion, all this really means is that more will be sold on less well-known sites with an arguably higher proliferation of fraud.
There's a bigger reason (Score:3, Interesting)
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That said, there is a certain amount of risk in doing any business online. Person-to-person transactions increase the risk. Transactions outside the bounds of the site's protection policies (which are mostly useless, but of measurably non-zero value) like unconfirmable virtual deliveries increase t
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
some games actually do this for a substatial number of items. While they couldn't do it for all items it has an added benefit of requiring people to grind for items themselves.
I'm no fan of ebay, but your argument makes no sense.
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
You paid for the game time and put the effort in to earn that copy of an item, so maybe it is yours. Artists at Blizzard created the item and it, just like everything else in that virtual world, is the intellectual property of Blizzard. Maybe the item belongs to them then.
There is also the issue that many MMO games have explict prohibitions against selling items. All it would take would be one publisher deciding Ebay was promoting violations and deciding to sue. Would they win? Doesn't matter because Ebay doesn't need the headache. They figure the listing fees wouldn't weigh against the cost of a court battle.
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There are a few reasons.
One, they don't want to lose customers who stop playing the game because they feel other people are buying success in the game that they can't afford.
Two, they don't want you selling things from their world when they could be selling those same things and keeping the money for themselves.
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Look at organ transfers: There is certainly demand for organs. A free market system might be a very efficient way of meeting the demand for organs, but it would put us in uncertain moral territory. In the absenc
Yup - eBay abdicates yet another market (Score:2)
STeve
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Moron's who try to fight Supply and Demand by messing with supply get no pity from me. Where there is enough demand, and supply is not flat impossible, there will be supply. The only way to prevent the sale of in-game artifacts is to make them non-transferable, and that's never going to happen.
Next you'll be telling me that banning alcohol would create a whole generation of moonshiners! And that people will buy drugs even though they're illegal!
Pfft. Such nonsense.
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I'd like to see both sides tackled in MMO gold selling. The only way to stop it is to make life difficult for the sellers and risky for the buyers.
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In fact, should this type of exchange become prevalent in the economy I'd suggest anti-monopoly regulators come down on the MMORPG businesses like a ton of bricks and force them to allow many companies access to the database tables to update them so we can get a real free market evaluation of the 'goods' in question (ie, approaching zero).
You see,
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Interesting)
The good news is that the damn fool who is farming is lowering the amount of time the damn fool spending money on virtual goods is spending on the game, freeing up the spender to do other actual work in the economy.
Entertainment is an economic sink, it disappears productivity into the (supposed) well being of the person being entertained. Placing a silly regulation on a form of entertainment because it is extra stupid is a bad idea.
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
or I can spend 3 hour working extra (or overtime) to make $30.00 and purchase 1000 gold.
what is your time worth to you?
What if it took you 3 hours to make 50 gold?
each game and even game server are different, but that was the exact exchange that many world of Warcraft players would face. Recently the market has shifted around, but at one point it was more economical to just purchase the gold.
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Practicing with shitty bands isnt an artificially scarce product.
"freeing up the spender to do other actual work in the economy."
The goods in question are _artificially_ scarce. _Neither_ needs to spend time as the items are _only a database update_. In the 'real world' it takes neither time nor resources to produce the in-game items; at a 'real world' market valuation, they could both (and, in fact, everyone in the game) have the particular item at zero cost, freeing them
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Person B has *something*, or can obtain/create *something*.
Person A pays Person B money in exchange for *something*.
It doesn't matter what that something is. Desirable is desirable. Opening up the database so that anybody could have anything at any time would eliminate all desire and the entire market.
I think you're missing the point that the thread starter essentially made: what is valuable in this situation is time. Given a long enough timeline, you can obtain every item in t
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While I was in college (in the 80's), a major source of my income was entering data off of printed lists for various companies. These companies seemed to think it was worth exchanging real-world money (up to $8.00/hour!) for a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
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Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:5, Insightful)
playerauctions (Score:2)
Re:Just Sell the Time (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC, almost every WoW character being sold on eBay had the same disclaimer stating something on the lines of "By looking at this webpage you are agreeing that you aren't a Blizzard employee. The sale of this auction doesn't involve any possesions, instead you are paying for my services and time that I put into this character."
That's probably why eBay made the decision to delist all virtual goods, because people were always finding ways to circumvent their rules by changing the wording. Now they won't be able to do that.
How about Chinese Counterfeit goods? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How about Chinese Counterfeit goods? (Score:5, Informative)
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They are the real thing, made during the "3rd shift". In other words, they make your widget 8 hours a day for sale in US stores, then run the factory the other 16 hours a day to make your widget for sale everywhere else on the planet.
This is really really old news BTW.
Of course the plans to your widget are available for sale even before they start making them for you, and others start making them too. Maybe that's what you meant? But those are real too, with your plans.
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If you ran a business where you allowed people to rent (subscription), say, a car (account), then a person started renting that car out or using it as a taxi service (selling account items, i.e.: gold or a sword) out to people and making money off the deal. You'd be pretty pissed, eh? Same thing.
In this scenario, the car (account) isn't there for the person (subscriber) to turn a profit (selli
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I agree that it's essentially the same thing.
I don't agree that there's a problem.
If I'm getting what I consider a fair value for the use of the goods, why would I care what use they were put to?
In fact, thi
It won't stop gold traders (Score:3, Informative)
For example, IGE.
If people still want to buy/sell virtual goods, there really isn't any way to prevent them.
Still, I salute Ebay for trying.
Nebulous (Score:2)
Don't game creators and server owners place very explicit copyright ownership clauses into their license agreements with users? People obviously break the rules without much thought, but isn't the exact legal ownership already determined in just about every virtual world? Second Life, for example, makes it very clear what the user does and does not own in their online documentation.
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No game company, AFAIK, is as clear about their stand on it as Blizzard is with WoW. The EULA specifically states that buying or selling virtual goods with real currency is a bannable offense. They don't enforce it very well, but they do enforce it. No one else, AFAIK, does.
shot in the foot.. and they're to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
This is insane. There's clearly a market for this activity. And there's clearly a way to handle it legitimately (i.e. IGE). Instead of setting up a parallel site (like eBay motors), they just decide they're not going to handle it at all. Way to serve your investors, ebay.
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I'd guess the potential costs of litigation far outweigh any profits to be made from allowing these actions. It's not like Ebay is lacking in traffic in other, more legitimate transactions. And yes, before someone makes a snarky comment, I'm aware there are plenty of illegitimate ebayers trafficking in other items. That doesn't affect this decision though.
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But rather than try and put any effort or brainpower into making it a white-market area, they just throw their hands up and give up.
Ebay's core mission is to be *the* auction site, for whatever "it" is that you're looking for. It's pretty clear that they feel this marketshare is too much "hassle" for them. Which I guess is fine, some startup will eat their lunch in this area, and ebay will have to fork over a couple bil
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That's the thing though... IGE isn't legitimate. If a MMORPG publisher finds out you bought gold or items from them, they can ban your account. eBay is protecting their customers.
It's either this, or field the "eBay shou
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As they could easily ban your account even if they didn't discover any TOS violation (they have no obligation to let you play), I fail to see how that changes anything.
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Many if not most games specify in the TOS that you may not exchange game goods for money or vice versa and that to do so is grounds for account termination.
It's not entirely clear that it IS legitimate.
It's also not entirely clear that it is property.
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That's how IGE and most other ingame item sellers make their cash. And it's perfectly legitimate.
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That's exactly what they're doing. Ebay is by far the biggest lawsuit target for these auctions. Lawsuits over IP can be huge in terms of money and PR. If they felt 100% legally confident they wouldn't have banned the auctions.
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If you'll remember, originally eBay allowed firearms listings on their site. As long as it is handled properly, it's perfectly legal to sell guns in such a manner (www.gunbroker.com and www.auctionarms.com both cater to this), but the number of sheer ignor
Sony vs eBay: Already in comic form (Score:2)
However, one has to consider court costs. Dinky MMOG Designer #32 won't likely be able to much. Imagine how much money eBay's legal department would waste if Sony's horde of lawyers were to raise the banner and go to war.
There was a series of comics about this quite some time ago over on GU Comics [gucomics.com] back in 2001. They are:
Verant vs. eBay [gucomics.com] and
Verant vs. eBay vs. Sony [gucomics.com].
(for those who don't know, Verant was the original developer house for Everquest. Sony owned it (at least most of it, I'm not 100% clear on this), and has since taken over the title entirely under their Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) division)
Can't you just offer real goods + virtual? (Score:3, Insightful)
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What about games that encourage this? (Score:2)
There are games (and whatever you want to call "Second Life") that encourage virtual-to-realworld economies. Will eBay differentiate on a per-game basis?
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But by definition, they have permission (Score:5, Insightful)
What about domain names? (Score:5, Interesting)
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eBay isn't the only web auction venue (Score:2)
Does Yahoo! Auctions have a domain names section?
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If you buy a domain name, sure you do not own anything tangible. However, you do own the name. I'm not exactly sure how registrars deal with this, but I do not think they have the ability to just arbitrarily expire your domain prematurely. This example might not be the best since I do not know all the in's and out's of how registration works, but you get the idea.
With video games like World of Warcraft, the items in question "belong" to the compan
Money destroys the game? (Score:2)
The sort of game you describe came pre-destroyed. As a potential new player, I don't care whether I can't get the "pink pantaloons" because they all went to people with much more disposable income than me, or whether I can't get them just because they all went to people with much more free time than me. If the people with tons of free time are starting to suffer at the hands of the people with tons of free cash, that's just not a
Is this a great country or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only can we buy crap we don't need, now we can buy crap that doesn't even exist. Whattacountry!
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Dangerous Precedent. How about CD sales? (Score:2)
The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner.
So, can I not sell used books, cd's, artwork or games?
Will eBay be shutting down Half.com?
Re:Dangerous Precedent. How about CD sales? (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus H. Christ, have you never heard of First Sale Doctrine [wikipedia.org]? I assure you that ebay's lawyers have, and will not be advising that they cut out a truly absurd percentage of their revenue over something that is legal. Anyway the two situations are not remotely similar. In the case of a book, cd, artwork, or game, you are selling physical media which contains some data.
In the case of a digital asset, you are selling a promise to make an alteration to a game world. There is no physical good and furthermore there is no intellectual property to transfer! It's not even like you exported an item out of the game world and are transferring the file representing the object. You are trying to sell something that clearly does not belong to you. You are not your character in world of warcraft. That's not even a representation of you. It's more like you've paid a monthly fee to play with someone else's action figures, in their sandbox.
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RTFA before summoning your god next time.
Yes, I know all about First Sale, but that's not the term of the UA that eBay cited in their decision, which was The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner.
RTFA Yourself. (Score:2)
Emphasis mine.
It clearly does not apply to CDs etc because those are not digitally delivered.
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Ok point taken. IANAL but I was unaware that all the elements of the game (ie: virtual property) were not considered part of that "first sale". To me it seems dangerous because if those elements are part of first sale, then they're overriding it. I would argue that if they're selling you a game in which the acquisition of virtual items is an inherent and inseparable part of the game, then those items are part of the first sale.
Re:Dangerous Precedent. How about CD sales? (Score:4, Informative)
If you're selling a physical item, you must be the owner of the physical item.
You don't own your WoW character. You own your CDs. You can sell your CDs but not your WoW character.
Done.
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eBay has tried several times to shut down Half.com even though they do not have any other venue for selling rare/low turnover items profitably. They only bou
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No, you can't sell the text in a book, the sound on a CD, the picture on a painting, or the data on game media. These are all the intellectual property of the content creators, and they have "copy" rights granted to them by congress in accordance with the constitution, which are also internationally recognized.
There is also an internationally recognized principle of first sale: if you buy the aforementioned content on media, you can transfer owne
Sounds like a ripe opportunity... (Score:2)
Is eBay that lazy? (Score:4, Interesting)
What about games that do allow or will allow buying of virtual property? It seems to me that eBay would be shooting themselves in the foot by blindly delisting all virtual items.
On a different topic, now where will I shop for a level 70 blood elf paladin?
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On a different topic, now where will I shop for a level 70 blood elf paladin?
My guess would be eBay.
Hypothetical situation:
You buy a piece of paper. That piece of paper is imprinted with the account and password (as a "free" bonus), the seller sends said paper through the mail and sends you a confirmation email containing the same information.
You bought a physical object, and got a virtual avatar as a bonus. If the seller "forgets" to physically mail the paper, who's going to complain?
Am I the only one who thinks... (Score:2)
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I don't use cheat codes, and I don't buy stuff off of goldfarming sites, and I don't do it because it ruins the game for me...Kills all the sense of satisfaction from accomplishing things.
But I understand why someone who's played a game up to level 60, and decides he wants to try a second character c
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You're entirely right, why the hell would anyone do that?
What's the point of even considering to play a game if you're just going to skip right to the end anyhow? That's like buying a movie ticket 2 hours late and walking into the theater to catch the last 10 minutes of the film. Bravo kids.
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Is mowing the lawn fundamentally flawed because people hire others to mow it? These gardeners wouldn't exist in such large numbers if the mowing process wasn't so damn tedious. But I'm just a curmudgeon who can't understand why 8 million people have lawns
Everyone will go to PlayerAuctions.com (Score:2, Interesting)
That's nice, but... (Score:3)
Still not clear. (Score:2, Insightful)
Last time I posted about this, some Virtual Fan Boy, with some Level 38 Condescention Skill took me to task but, here goes:
Why would someone spend good hard cash to get virtual stuff simply for the game play? This follows a question of course, after that Korean chap killed himself with exhaustion after DAYS of nonstop gaming, WHY?
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Why would someone spend good hard cash to pull a lever and watch three wheels with pictures on them spin around and never show three in a row? Why would someone spend good hard cash on alcohol night after night when they know it's ruining their life? Why do people eat more calories in a day than they consume? WHY?
Compulsive behavior does not need a why. You could think of it in terms of stimulus/reward, a la Skinner's pige
Attention online item and gold buyers! (Score:3, Informative)
You DON'T need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on nothing!
Here's a link to website with a huge listing of charitable organizations. I promise you that giving 2 grand to help the needy or cure a disease will make you feel better than spending 2 grand on a shiny new level 70 rogue.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/ [charitynavigator.org]
Comprende?
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Assuming you put a value on your time, which you should.
Think about it, there is this great fun game, but there is one part which isn't so fun.
You can spend 100 hour doing the unfun stuff, and then have fun..or you can spend 80 bucks and have it done for you in a few minutes. Which makes more sense in that scenerio?
Too some people, paying 80 bucks to have 1000s of hours of fun is worth money.
Compared to other forms of entertainment, that's pretty
Uh, no. (Score:2)
Bullshit. SOE and Sigil just opened the servers for Vanguard today, and the EULA/TOS forbids you (not surprisingly) from selling in-game stuff for RL cash. They also have a huge blurb in there where you agree not to sue them if they change things in-game such that your supposed investment tanks in value.
Virtual items = informational PDF files (Score:4, Interesting)
Lucky for me my hunter was so epic (Score:5, Interesting)
The kicker is that about 6 hours after I got the paypal payment for it, eBay sends me an email saying they have taken my auction down because it violated Blizzard's IP. The auction was already done! Hilarious work, eBay... not only did I get the money for my character, but I didn't have to pay eBay for the auction cost.
The other guy got my account;
I got money for the time I put into the character;
Blizzard got the money for the game CDs and my monthly subscription;
Paypal got their bite out of our transaction;
eBay lost money for the bandwidth, site design and hosting.
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Here are the cheat codes [gamefaqs.com] for guitar hero II.
They all contain cheats that unlock everything in the game. GameFaqs has all the unlocking content cheats for Gran Turismo and probably any other game that has unlockable content. So really all games come with all the content, if you really want them to.
The problem with WoW is there are no cheat codes (well techinically speaking).
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I pay my subs for WoW, and that's it. I earn everything ingame myself. But there is definitely a market for this. It's mostly people who have more money than time, and use that money to compensate for lack of time.
And for the record, I loved the South Park WoW episode too.
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So you're a REAL elf? (Score:2, Funny)
Directory of Virtual Marketplaces (Score:3, Informative)