I have declared a second major in computer science and will graduate in December 2010. This means that I’m now a double major in computer science and economics. I’m currently looking for a summer job within the realm of computer science that would hopefully lead to a full-time position after graduation.
Please let me know if you hear of anything! My resume can be found in the sidebar to the right.
Well, summer is here! The semester is over and now I’m trying to figure out what to do with myself. In the meantime, I thought I’d get a new post up here and share some of my favorite reads relating to virtual economics. If anyone reading this has any suggestions, please leave me a comment suggesting more good references. Here are a few essential reads:
by Ed Castronova, the economist who pioneered the study of the economics of virtual worlds
* Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games
* Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality
by Julian Dibbel, a journalist who explores gold farming and real-money trade in games:
* Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
I’d say that Castronova’s first book, Synthetic Worlds, introduces some interesting ideas, such as determining the labor productivity and GDP of Norrath, the world of EverQuest. He dedicates a lot of the book to explaining what virtual worlds are, and both of his books feel like they’re aimed at people with little to no experience existing in a virtual world. Still, they’re worth reading.
Julian Dibbel’s book could also be considered a general audience book, but there’s enough content in there to engage any reader, even veterans of virtual worlds. The book is superbly written, which is no surprise because Dibbel is a journalist. In Play Money, Dibbel chronicles his time acting as a broker for virtual goods after detailing how he himself became addicted to the game. The title claims he tried to make “millions trading virtual loot”, but his goal was just to earn enough of a salary selling virtual goods in order to earn as much as he could writing. It turns out he did, but at the cost of a big part of his “real” life. The book is interesting because he interviews many people involved in the “real money trade” aspect of virtual economies, and really explores just how big that market is.
Again, I’d love it if people could post comments letting me know what they think of these books as well as the names of other books that would be of interest.
I know this doesn’t fit into the realm of virtual worlds per se, but it’s still of interest to any Blizzard geeks like myself: you can now opt-in for the Starcraft 2 beta! To do so, simply log into your Battle.net account (all Blizzard accounts have been automatically converted to Battle.net accounts) and choose to opt-in for the beta test by clicking here. If you don’t have a Battle.net account, you can create one for free here. You’ll have to attach a key from one Blizzard game that you own (WoW counts too) and then you’re set. Once you’re logged into your account, you’ll have to download a small application which will grab a few stats from your computer (namely processor speed, OS version, RAM, hard drive capcity, video card and video driver). Once that’s uploaded, you should automatically be entered into the pool of potential applicants for the beta.
For more info on the beta, see here: http://starcraft2.com/beta-faq.xml
Best of luck to everyone!
For those who have been following the Blizzard vs. MDY Industries case (makers of WoW bot Glider), there have been a few developments. First of all, Judge Campbell ruled in favor of Blizzard and awarded damages of approximately $6 million. Further, he said that since Michael Donnelly, the owner of MDY, had run the business “close to his heart”, he’s personally responsible for the damages. The court granted Blizzard an injunction, preventing MDY from marketing or selling Glider. MDY requested a stay of this injunction pending appeal, stating that they’d lose too much of their market share before the appellate court could make a decision if they couldn’t market or sell Glider, which was denied. So, MDY and Glider are essentially dead until the ninth court of appeals makes a decision to either affirm or overrule Judge Campbell’s decision, which could potentially be months down the line.
What’ll be interesting to see is if anything changes in the game in the coming months. Like others have commented on my previous posts, there are other bots besides Glider, including many private ones. Additionally, many of the characters who are doing the “botting” are physically controlled by Asian farmers, who some argue constitute much of the “botter” community.
Will we see a rise in prices of WoW commodities on the auction house as a result of this ban? Were Gliders really producing a lot of the commonly-traded goods, and the economy is seeing a contraction of supply as a result of their termination? Not likely. World of Warcraft has upwards of 12 million players worldwide, and I doubt that there are enough people affected by this decision to make a noticeable impact on the game economy.
If anyone has any accurate data on the prices of major WoW trade goods across multiple servers, please let me know. I’m considering writing a script that will pull data from WoWEcon.com and show a graph of price changes along with major WoW-community events (bots getting shut down, WoW patches, etc.). Would anyone be interested in seeing something like this?
I’d like to wish a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to anyone reading this blog – all 2 of you. I have decided to find time to start writing more articles and comments pertaining to the ecomonimcs and legal issues of virtual worlds throughout the new year. So, be on the lookout for new posts!
I have recently been asked by the great guys at GameRates.com to write a guest post for them. I decided to write about Ed Castronova and his team’s results with regard to the Arden project.
You can see my post here. Let me know what you think!
Our friends over at VirtuallyBlind have reported that Blizzard has won the ongoing lawsuit against MDY Industries, the makers of the most popular World of Warcraft bot: Glider. I’ll leave the legal commentary to Mr. Duranske, because what we’re interested in here are the long-term effects of the World of Warcraft economy. As I said in another thread, a round of banning on Blizzard’s part caused a dramatic rise in the real-money value of virtual WoW gold. Could a similar increase in prices be on the rise?
While no official statistics could be found, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of botters use Glider. After all, it’s the most widely used bot that has sold a few hundred thousand copies (according to information that came up in court). On the other hand, many of the gold farming operations in Asia do everything by hand with extremely cheap labor (see this preview of an interesting documentary). So, if Glider has been deemed to be infringing upon Blizzard’s copyright whenever it’s in use, does this give Blizzard a right to shut down the sale of Glider? If so, would this drive supply of gold down and shoot prices up? Or will the hard-working Chinese prevail and keep prices down for us lazy players?
Recently the folks at Linden Labs and IBM have teamed up to port the first avatar between virtual worlds. See more here.
This is an interesting development. To what extent will characters/avatars/data be transferable between worlds? Will your 70 Tauren Warrior be able to hop in a car and drive around a virtual town? Will he be able to walk to the end of Azeroth and into Second Life? Probably not. More likely, you’ll be able to communicate with players of other virtual games…. even people playing your game, but on a different server. In the future, anyone playing any sort of online game will be able to communicate with everyone else. This is a cool proposition.
An important thing to keep in mind is that content from other games may ruin the feeling that I’m immersed in a world. When I’m slaying beasts in Azeroth I don’t really want to see some guy from Second Life flying around. It’ll be interesting to see how companies make use of this cross-platform technology without hampering upon the immersion and culture of each individual game.
According to a recent report by GameRates.com, a large banning effort by Blizzard has caused the price of WoW gold to skyrocket. Allegedly the ban nabbed many gold sellers and gold “mules”, characters with enormous amounts of gold that companies used to distribute their illicit goods. Blizzard used to announce the fact that they’d closed numerous accounts for violations of the TOS (including botters, gold farmers and the like), but recently they’ve decided to keep the bans hush-hush. I don’t know if their goal is to keep the community guessing or what, but I’d think that the bust of a bunch of gold farmers (who are the bane of a WoW player’s experience) would be a big PR opportunity.
Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see the effects of this ban. Will gold sellers start farming again, or will they move on to other games such as Age of Conan? WoW is still the industry giant at around 11 million subscribers, but perhaps there is opportunity to be had selling gold for other games. After all, less competition means higher prices and higher profits.
Some of the games that are free-to-play but charge customers for essentially useless upgrades actually make more monthly revenue per user than the paid subscription models do. For instance, Maple Story makes an average of about $20 per user per month just on crap they purchase in-game from the company. See full story here: http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/2046-NOTED-Free-to-Play-Fun-Nexons-Maplestory-earns-20-Million-in-Virtual-Item-Sales-in-2007.html
The question is: why hasn’t Blizzard moved in this direction? They’re a for-profit company, so shouldn’t they do what makes the most sense financially?
Blizzard’s stance has always been against RMT. I think their reasoning is that it undermines the hard work many people have put into the game. Why should I grind this character when I can just buy one from a botting site? Similarly, if people could just buy items/gold from Blizzard directly, there would be no incentive to keep playing the game. They would get bored very easily. Again, there’s no reason for them to spend countless hours defeating bosses to earn an epic item when some kid next door can whip out his credit card and achieve the same status in-game. Many gamers might be inclined to cancel their subscriptions, leading to losses for Blizzard. Maybe this is their argument?
Overall though, I think Blizzard’s stance is more on “moral” grounds than financial ones. They’ve always been dedicated to creating awesome games that are fun to play. The passion is there. While of course profit is one of their main goals as a company, I don’t think it’s their only goal. I think the Maple Story article makes this obvious. If their main priority was to seek revenue, they would have already started to sell goods directly to players.
Thoughts?
