Virtual Property and Real Money Trading

one of the features that MMO environments/games lay claim to is the ability to make (real) money of in-game activity: Ultima Online has its gold farmers; Second Life has its virtual millionaires.

However, this real world financial benefit from virtual activity has some inherent problems - notwithstanding taxation issues, which many taxation authorities are starting to take interest in, and whether this benefit is being obtained through the operation of a pyramid scheme. Most notably, real world financial benefit - Real Money Trading, or RMT, as it's known - has a hazy relationship to property ownership: ie, if I 'own' a magic sword in an online world, does that sword belong to me, or to the company hosting the online world, to the holder of the world's IP, or to someone else?

In this light, it is worth noting that eBay has recently announced that it will suspend and remove all auction listings for all virtual artifacts; says the report on Slashdot:

[t]his includes currency, items, and accounts/characters; not even the 'neopoints' used in the popular Neopets service is exempt from this decision

According to Slashdot, who are carrying a comment from an eBay spokesperson, the reason for this decision is that virtual artifacts/ in-game property breaks eBay's digitally delivered property policy:

The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner

In many ways, this announcement from eBay - being reported around the interweb - is completely obvious: in what sense can i own my magic sword, really? However, this is also a serious threat to persistent game communities, whether they be MMO games or closed gardens like Xbox Live. If I can channel Fernand Braudel for a moment, whenever you get more than one person assembled in one place, you have a market (but note: not a capitalist market) - eBay clearly recognises and trades on this phenomenon, offering as it does a marketplace for pretty much any old shite you can imagine - and this market activity is one of the key functions in the development of community and reciprocal obligations.

There are obviously Intellectual Property issues that need to be resolved here in order that the IP holders make the monster profits they're envisaging. However, if it's true that Web2.0 = community = gaming, as we're being led (correctly, in my opinion) to believe , then attempting to so resolve these IP questions by removing the market-making ability of the participant communities would seem to me to be foreclosing the very monetisation routes the IP holders are dreaming of developing.

what do users want...

from their online game and content distribution system? A good question, and one which Microsoft have clearly been pondering as they plan a version of Xbox Live. One way of working out what users want is, well, to ask them: which one of MS's platform strategists has done on his blog; asking readers for their thoughts on future directions of Xbox Live:

Your Thoughts on the Future of Live

A thread worth following, especially in light of Xbox Live's move into Live for Windows, a service which will enable a variety of non-Xbox (but all MS) devices to connect (with reduced functionality) to Xbox Live.

where is the gaming market heading?

If you're interested in what big media companies think, you might be interested in this:

Vivendi's Investor Presentation, June 2006.

There are lots of points of interest in there - it's worth reading - but i'll highlight the listed growth drivers for Sierra Online, Vivendi's non-MMORG game developer: