Pass go and collect your £200. The gaming world just got more interesting this week, when Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), the leader in real-world sales of virtual-world objects, opened the first foreign exchange market for games. From this week, gamers playing Everquest will be able to swap their hard-earned Platinum for the currency of Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online fans need not feel their hours of gameplay were wasted when they decide to move over to Camelot or Lineage 2, and the citizens of Final Fantasy XI can exchange their hard work for the equivalent in Second Life.
Let's step back a second. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), are one of the biggest, fasting-growing areas of the internet. Millions of players worldwide pay monthly subscription fees, and log hours online to control characters in enormous computer-generated universes. One of the most popular, Lineage, has four million players in South Korea alone. They explore, trade and fight their way through the games, choosing roles to play and building their own niches within the game universe.
Everyone starts these games at the lowest level and must trade and fight their way up. As players spend an average of 20 hours a week playing, a market in higher level game characters - plus the in-game objects, weapons, treasure and suchlike - has grown up. You can buy Ultima Online and Everquest characters on eBay, for example, with higher level warriors going for nearly $1,000 (£546).
Some people even make their living trading, using eBay, Paypal and, more recently, specialist online brokerages to buy and sell their virtual-world objects for cash. Reports of individuals making $30,000-$40,000 a year from game playing are not uncommon.
So popular are these games, and so widespread the trading, that Edward Castronova, Associate Professor of Economics at California State University, Fullerton, was able to work out the GNP of the Everquest game, based on the internal wealth creation converted into real world cash at the market rate. The 450,000 inhabitants of the Everquest world - called Norrath - make up the 77th richest nation on the planet. Norrath's GNP, of $2,266 per capita, is bigger than India or China, and nearly as big as Russia.
And so, until now, a player wanting to switch games but retain a similar level to the one they had spent perhaps hundreds of hours playing, would have to either invest another great wad of time, or a lot of money. Enter Internet Gaming Entertainment. IGE is the largest game object brokerage today. Brock Pierce, one of the founders, says it has, at any one time, close to $1m in virtual inventory, stored in virtual warehouses, in out-of-the-way places within these virtual worlds. It claims to trade "several million" dollars' worth of built-up characters, weapons, treasure and other in-game objects every day.
Based in Florida, it has another office in Hong Kong that provides 24-hour technical support and trading, and has been in business for three years. The most common customer, Pierce says, is the cash rich but time poor, who will buy a game character that someone else has spent the necessary hours building up to a respectable level.
The new venture, the currency exchange, is slightly different. There needn't be any real world cash involved, but established players in one game can directly exchange their time investment in the game for something similar in another game.
This is very tempting: a recent survey of MMORPG players found that many spent more than six hours a day living within their chosen virtual world. Many of these are not playing to make money, real or otherwise, or to level-up their characters, but for those who are, being able to take their booty to other universes may well be a great service.
Either way, the line between the virtual world and the real one just got more fuzzy. For example, 500,000 platinum pieces on the Everquest's Antonius Bayle server is freely convertible to 525,000 Gils in the Caitsith server of Final Fantasy XI. That same amount of Everquest platinum will also go for $425, in more conventional money, and the price is going up. George Soros, it seems, could well be in the wrong business.
Links A virtual fortune
http://x.ige.com
www.everquest.com
www.lineage2.com
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