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THE RUMORS ARE TRUE:
PLAY
MONEY IS NOW A BOOK.
(And you can buy it at Amazon.)
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Market Watch
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $47,336 (-52,178 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $1.2 million
Market volume total: 1,252 sales (-1,225)
Exchange rate: $14.05 (-0.40) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $125.27 (-10.55)
My gold holdings: 121.4 million gp ($1,705.67)
My dollar holdings: $690.75
My profits, year to date: $3,131.42
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
9:45 AM
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Happy New Fiscal Quarter!
Live from the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, I'm wishing you and yours a prosperous new year -- more prosperous, at any rate, than the one I just completed, which closes with a whopping $3,131.42 in profit accrued from my dealings in virtual items.
I am on vacation now and for the first time in months don't have a single item up for sale on eBay. I suppose I should be using this downtime to strategize and regroup for a more profitable quarter going forward, but I'll save that for my return to South Bend. Meanwhile, don't worry too much about me. I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve, none of which I'm at liberty to disclose just now. Stay tuned, and stay well.
8:02 PM
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Market Watch
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $99,514 (+19,540 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $2.6 million
Market volume total: 2,477 sales (+667)
Exchange rate: $14.45 (-0.02) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $135.82 (-12.68)
My gold holdings: 126.4 million gp ($1826.48)
My dollar holdings: $647.97
My profits, year to date: $3,061.42
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
9:49 AM
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Stop the Presses! Beijing Court Enshrines Virtual Property as Legal Fact!
OK, so, four days after the fact, the eyebrow-raising verdict in the world's "first virtual property rights dispute case" is already old news. But being the busy, important, and exceptionally good-looking person all Play Money readers are, you may have had better things to do than take note of a lower-level Chinese court's decision in the case of Li Hongchen, 24-year-old power gamer, vs. Arctic Ice, Beijing game company. And besides, even if you did catch the first wave of reports, maybe you're still wondering, as I am, just which eyebrow you're supposed to be raising.
First, a recap. Li, it seems, was a happy and successful player of Arctic Ice's massively multiplayer game Red Moon (a/k/a Hongyue) until the day a hacker broke into his account and stole all his hard-earned stuff, including an arsenal of extremely leet "bio-chemical weapons." The game company refused to help him ID the hacker, citing player-privacy policies. (Or, if you prefer conspiracy theories [and read Spanish], the company stonewalled because it had put the hacker up to the job in the first place, miffed that Li had gotten so good at the game and fearful that he was spoiling the fun for all the other customers.) The police, likewise, gave Li no satisfaction. So Li turned to the Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court, suing Arctic Ice for restitution and damages. And in the end, the court obliged, ordering Arctic Ice to hand back the goods.
Crazy stuff, for sure. But as cooler heads have observed (notably in comments on the story over at Terra Nova), the court's decision wasn't necessarily a ruling about property at all. Rather, the return of the items is just as easily framed as fair compensation for the wasted time and psychological damage Li suffered as a result of Arctic Ice's poor security practices. It is arguably a tort case rather than a property case, in other words.
And does that matter? Maybe not. Property or tort, what the case really seems to be about, in the end, is governance. Whatever else the court may have ruled, its most important judgment was that the game company, sovereign ruler of Li Hongchen's game world though it may be, has no unqualified right to piss on him as it pleases.
Yes, game developers, you tyrants of the virtual universe, hear well those words -- and tremble.
Or, I dunno, have your lawyers start writing some kind of workaround into your end-user license agreements?
11:08 AM
Friday, December 19, 2003
A Very Special Christmas-Slump Episode
I have had exactly one sale in the last five days: a $24.99 100% lower reagents cost suit, bought by a Wyoming woman as a Christmas present for her "hubby." She doesn't play the game herself and seemed a little baffled by the entire process ("I can't believe I'm buying something that doesn't really exist!:)"). Her husband plays on the Sonoma shard, and I was happy to discover that the one suit in my inventory there was a very nice specimen: all-leather, all pieces dyed a deep cobalt blue. In another nice coincidence, OSI just gave out its holiday gifts for players, the usual crap (a poinsettia plant, a snowman, a snowflake, a holiday wreath) except that they came in a lovely box wrapped in festive ribbon. I cleared the crap out of the box and put the suit in, all nice and Christmas-wrapped for when hubby comes to pick it up.
And to think some people call me a griefer.
12:40 PM
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Market Watch
Note the drastic drop in overall sales volume, which I can tell you reflects my own sales pretty accurately. I'd be sweating it pretty hard if not for the fact that Mr. Big says this happens every year in the weeks before Christmas: "I guess people actually spend time with their family or something -- crazy."
As for the price of gold -- can it be that last week's reports of massive counterfeiting were greatly exaggerated? The famous exploit ran its course two weeks ago. You'd think by now the eBay market for gp would reflect the bloating of the money supply that supposedly resulted. But no: it's steady as she goes. So either UO's developers kicked some serious exploiter ass and wiped all that gold off the servers, or it was all just a collective bad dream.
One final note: I've tweaked the real-estate item a bit. The price tracked is now that of an 18x18 mansion in any region of the game, not just the up-scale Malas area. This will give me a greater sample set to average from and therefore result in less volatile, more meaningful price info (though it won't necessarily reflect quite as well the very real effect of location on UO housing prices).
Now here's your weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $79,974 (-42,210 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $2.1 million
Market volume total: 1,810 sales (-1,029)
Exchange rate: $14.47 (+0.26) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18-tile mansion: $148.50 (-0.50)
My gold holdings: 105.8 million gp ($1,530.93)
My dollar holdings: $735.09
My profits, year to date: $3,061.42
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
10:10 AM
Friday, December 12, 2003
Golden Shower
Sigh.
Remember that new age I said was dawning in the UO economy the other week? The one that was supposed to spell hard times for the gold farmers and high times for the price of the Britannian gold piece?
Well, I'm not saying it's time to start shorting the gp or anything, but the transition to our brave new economy has apparently gone less smoothly than planned. To wit: the very same game patch that introduced the new economic rules seems also to have introduced a gold-gusher of a bug, allowing some people to conjure themselves up a few hundred million gold pieces in the space of a week (and others to conjure up a few hundred lines of futile complaint). The bug was fixed last Friday, and the new rules seem otherwise to be working out fine. But people: if the exploiters cooked up as much gp as folks are claiming they did, then the money supply probably just about doubled last week. Which means of course that by the time the new money gets fully circulated, gold will be selling for $7 per million.
You read it here first.
Sigh.
9:40 PM
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Market Watch
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $122,184 (-10,341 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $3.2 million
Market volume total: 2,839 sales (-345)
Exchange rate: $14.21 (-0.04) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $149.00 (+3.37)
My gold holdings: 67.65 million gp ($961.31)
My dollar holdings: $1,253.59
My profits, year to date: $3,061.42
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
6:10 PM
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Farewell to Tatooine
Thus ends my brief career as a dealer in Star Wars: Galaxies currency, not with a bang but with an email message from the good folks at eBay's "Trust and Safety Department":
We would like to let you know that we removed your listing:
3062780808 1 MIL CREDITS Lowca Star Wars Galaxies SWG
3062780805 1 MIL CREDITS Kettemoor Star Wars SWG
3062780792 1 MIL CREDITS Flurry Star Wars Galaxies SWG
3062780814 1 MIL CREDITS Tarquinas Star Wars SWG
because a Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Program participant notified us, under penalty of perjury, that your listing or the item itself infringes their copyright, trademark, or other rights.
We have credited any associated fees to your account. We have also notified the bidders that the listing(s) was removed, and that they are not obligated to complete the transaction.
If you relist this or any other similar items on eBay, your account likely will be suspended.
[...]
Thank you for your cooperation.
Regards,
Customer Support (Trust and Safety Department)
eBay Inc
The "verified rights owner" in question is Sony Online Entertainment, publishers of SWG. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say they've perjured themselves, their legal counsel is surely sophisticated enough to know how thoroughly they distort the meaning of intellectual property when they claim my SWG sales violate anybody's IP rights.
What I did violate, of course, are the terms of my contract with SOE -- that fine-print end-user agreement thingy that every player clicks assent to without reading every time they play. And since I stood before a room of legal scholars at New York Law School's State of Play conference just a few weeks ago and declared these sorts of agreements to be the closest thing to a social contract that exists in today's virtual worlds (here's my presentation in a nutshell), it wouldn't look too good for me to be getting huffy about this.
Besides, I much prefer the consequences of Sony's dubious IP claims (a few auctions suspended at no cost me) to the more direct consequences I could have suffered from my actual transgression: my game account banned and me out the $50 I paid to set it up.
Here's to civilized hypocrisy.
9:22 AM
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Market Watch
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $132,525 (-3,730 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $3.4 million
Market volume total: 3,184 sales (-37)
Exchange rate: $14.25 (+0.05) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $145.63 (-58.37)
My gold holdings: 74.45 million gp ($1,060.91)
My dollar holdings: $843.63
My profits, year to date: $3,002.82
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
9:07 PM
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