play money
DIARY of a dubious proposition



BY JULIAN DIBBELL
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BIO
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PLAY MONEY now at Amazon THE RUMORS ARE TRUE:
PLAY MONEY IS NOW A BOOK.


(And you can buy it at Amazon.)

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Market Watch  

This week, a contest: Who can tell me why in God's name the price of real estate would have gone up in a week when tens of thousands of housing plots are suddenly free for the taking? The first reader to send me an economically plausible explanation gets an entire Play Money entry devoted to his or her genius.

Now here's your weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:

Market sales total: $137,612 (+3,892 from two weeks ago)

Market sales total, annualized: $3.6 million

Market volume total: 3,523 sales (+195)

Exchange rate: $14.39 (+0.08) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces

Price of an 18x18-tile mansion: $178.11 (+26.96)

My gold holdings: 137.6 million gp ($1,980.06)

My dollar holdings: $422.51

My profits, last 12 months: $3,588.92

(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)

3:12 PM



Correction  
My most recent entry described Kenneth Merrill as a "founder" of the Gaming Open Market. As the text now indicates, Merrill is a user of the market but not otherwise affiliated with it. The actual founder and brains of the operation, as I damn well could have told you, is the visionary Mr. Jamie Hale.

8:01 AM



Tuesday, January 27, 2004

This Is Not My Beautiful House  


Here is something I have somehow neglected, in all the months of this endeavor, to show you: A picture of the world that makes my business possible. More precisely, it's a screenshot of my main character there, the blacksmith Alhinud, in the mansion I designed and built for him 11 months ago on the Great Lakes shard.

Take a good look, because you're not likely to see this image again. I sold the house a little over two weeks back, for 60 million gold pieces. I could have had $600 cash, but gold is looking like a solid investment right now, and by the time I sell this pile off it should bring me $800 or more.

That's clear profit, too. I put nothing but sweat equity into that house -- camped the login screen for hours on the day the Age of Shadows expansion launched, claimed my plot the instant the new territories opened up, spent another week or so shaping the house itself into the gothic-Moorish palace I'd been dreaming of. I lived there, too, for another many months, plying my craft, talking to passers-by, even taking on a roommate, Radny, as those of you who have followed this journal from its beginnings may recall.

But then one day I got serious about making money, which meant that I had to start up characters on all the English-speaking shards and spend my days shuttling from one to another, looking for deals. I spent less and less time on Great Lakes, less and less time in my mansion. After a while Radny stopped showing up, and I learned he'd let his account lapse.

I don't know why I didn't sell sooner. No, I do know why. I didn't want to believe I'd stopped living there. I didn't want to think I'd stopped playing the game and slid into the distant, alienated perspective voiced recently by Gaming Open Market client Kenneth Michael Merrill, a trader in the currencies of UO, Star Wars: Galaxies, and Second Life, among others:

"I feel like I am above the players of these games," Merrill told Wired News the other day. "They are toiling and investing hours and hours into creating wealth and building empires and here I am, no virtual avatar running around and no virtual real estate, just skimming money off the top."

Must commerce always alienate? Is it by definition the opposite of lived community?

Maybe so. Still, it warms my heart a little to know that the buyer I sold my house to was my old friend Mr. Big, and that he in turn sold it to a player who makes his living in real life as an artist, who will pay for the house not in cash but with a portrait of Mr. Big's six-month-old son.

7:29 PM



Friday, January 23, 2004

IGE Watch  
Jesus, I can't leave town for a week without IGE assimilating some new piece of the market into its Borg-like corporate maw. This time they bit big: MySuperSales, owned and operated by the legendary Jonathan Yantis, was until yesterday quite the biggest fish in this pond, with sales of EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars: Galaxies, and other game items approaching not seven but eight figures yearly. Now it's just another IGE tentacle.

Anyway, yes, I'm back, in case you were wondering. And open for business. Feel free to check out the merchandise.

2:07 PM



Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Flying Down to Rio  
I am on my way to the airport, headed for a week in Brazil. I'll be reporting a story for Wired, about the unbearable hipness of the Brazilian government's policies toward intellectual property (clue: when free-software guru Richard Stallman comes to the country, he gets invited to address the national legislature). It's work, of course, but it could be worse. It's summer down there right now, and I will be spending much of the week in my dear old Rio de Janeiro and in the company of a dear old friend or two.

All the same, it says something about what the Play Money project has done to my mental health that I can't say, honestly, that I wouldn't rather be spending the next week tending my virtual-goods business with the fulltime attention I have yet to be able to give it. Instead, I have had to suspend all my eBay auctions again for the week -- and probably won't be doing much more than tread water till the article is finished, in another month or so.

Perhaps by then I won't even remember why I wanted to get into this business in the first place. Here's hoping.

8:40 AM



Market Watch  
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:

Market sales total: $133,720 (+3,083 from last week)

Market sales total, annualized: $3.5 million

Market volume total: 3,328 sales (+108)

Exchange rate: $14.31 (+0.12) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces

Price of an 18x18-tile mansion: $151.15 (+9.24)

My gold holdings: 147.6 million gp ($2,112.16)

My dollar holdings: $1,223.83

My profits, last 12 months: $3,131.42

(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)

2:36 AM



Monday, January 12, 2004

Point, Counterpoint  
If you've ever wondered just why so many game developers have it in for us merchants of the unreal, take a look at this Terra Nova thread, wherein Jessica Mulligan, author of the more or less canonical Developing Online Games: An Insider's Account, lays it on the line:

These companies are a customer service nightmare for developers and publishers. If someone gets cheated, who do you think gets called? When the "property" company uses a macro that camps a spawn or repeatedly ranges an area and blocks other off from it so it can farm stuff to sell, who do you think gets the complaint call? Who do you think the players curse when such a company intentionally crashes the server at a boundary line to try to create a dupe situation? Do you have any idea of how many man-hours these guys can suck out of a week?

I'd heard this argument before and, I confess, never quite bought it. Honestly, how many man-seconds can it take to say "Caveat f---ing emptor" and move on to the next crybaby in the phone queue, especially if your Terms of Service makes it even halfway clear that third-party sales are neither your company's business nor its responsibility?

But if Jessica Mulligan says it, it must be true. And besides, now that I think about it, why wouldn't it be true? The average player sees game developers as the sovereign powers of their worlds, like it or not, and mostly of course the developers do like it. But the downside of being seen to be all-powerful is being expected to be all-powerful. When injustice happens in or around a virtual world players are going to do there what they tend to do in the real world: look to the local sovereign to correct it. Which is hell on those man-hours, as any over-docketed judge can tell you.

Still, this hardly answers the question of whether the eBaying of virtual goods is a bad thing, on balance, for the worlds it affects. And if you've ever wondered what it sounds like when an honest participant in the virtual-goods economy gets fed up once and for all with being lumped into the MMORPG criminal class, read no further than the reply of one Mike Meadows to Jessica Mulligan's learned disquisition:

What a bunch of garbage. Seriously. There is really not a thing on this planet earth that cannot be bought and sold. You might say love - but the people who work in the red-light district in Amsterdam would beg to differ. Game creators are constantly saying it's their ball - and if you don't play with it like they say - they're going home. Well - it might be your ball - but if you don't let your subscribers play with it, it really won't do you much good. I can't believe you are saying that real-life sellers of virtual items are "scum-bag, lowlife sellers", or a blanket statement saying that all item brokers are exploiters.... I agree with you that SOME companies will do things like this - but I can assure you - not all of them do. Most of the people who do this are nice guys - I have purchased items from them many times and am always very happy with my purchase.

God bless you, Mike Meadows. Whoever you are.

12:51 PM



Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Market Watch  
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:

Market sales total: $130,637 (+83,301 from last week)

Market sales total, annualized: $3.4 million

Market volume total: 3,220 sales (+1,968)

Exchange rate: $14.19 (+0.14) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces

Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $141.91 (+16.64)

My gold holdings: 113.3 million gp ($1,607.73)

My dollar holdings: $782.38

My profits, last 12 months: $3,131.42

(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)

10:16 AM



Tuesday, January 06, 2004

The Unsinkable IGE  
Oh dear. It appears there is no stopping the IGE juggernaut. When last we looked into the progress of this Wal-Mart of the virtual-goods economy, they were on the brink of announcing a move into the Ultima Online space, and I was quaking in my Shadow Dancer Leggings.

Happily, IGE's UO rollout seems to have hit a snag (they've had a "Coming Soon" sign hanging on their UO page for the last three weeks). But that hasn't put a crimp in their plans to take over the universe. Today they announced that the class-act Themis Group of online-game consultants will henceforth handle their marketing and PR. Just how this will sit with other Themis clients was left unaddressed, though it's not beyond the realm of imagination that some game developers might have, oh, mixed feelings about Themis's endorsement of a business model that pretty much depends on the routine violation of game-company terms-of-service agreements.

My own feelings, as usual, are also mixed. This sort of professionalism is a first for the, uh, industry, none of whose captains has hitherto pushed their marketing strategies much past the online equivalent of leaving phone numbers on bathroom walls. And professionalism, I suppose, is always a good thing.

But I dunno. Part of what drew me to this business, I have to confess, was the faint aroma of cheesiness it tends to give off. If it suddenly becomes a respectable component of the gaming market (no more remarkable or controversial than, say, the merchandising of golf clubs to golfers), then I guess I can get behind that -- but I think I'm out of here.

7:49 PM



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