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Nonetheless, some game designers believe the study encourages other companies to bring exchanges in-house.
"It is always nice to have hard numbers," said Patricia Pizer, a longtime designer of online games. "I'm very happy, as a designer, to see a company making an effort to get rid of the third-party issue."
While Station Exchange was never meant to be about providing players with a way to earn a living, the report did say that the top Station Exchange seller for the service's first year made a total of $37,435 on 351 transactions, while another seller also topped $37,000.
Still, in the wake of reports that Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung had become perhaps the first virtual world millionaire, $37,000 doesn't seem like much.
That point is amplified by author Julian Dibbell's personal story, which he wrote about in the book, Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. Dibbell had become a major seller of Ultima Online goods and attempted to prove he could make more money selling those goods than he did as a professional journalist. While he made a substantial amount of money, his book suggested it was a constant and not hugely lucrative struggle.
Castronova said the top Station Exchange sellers' income and Dibbell's experience showed that selling virtual goods doesn't necessarily look like the road to riches, particularly because many virtual goods sellers live in low-wage countries like China.
"I think Julian's story and these data are a very helpful corrective to the hype around, 'You can go into Second Life and make billions of dollars,'" Castronova said. "You're competing with very low-wage workers."
Nonetheless, Dibbell is more optimistic. If you can do this "full time...you'll quickly ramp up to a pretty decent living," he said. "In the end, I was on my way to a $60,000 (annual) salary."
The study reported that, for the most part, sellers were men in their 20s and buyers were men in their 30s. It also said two of the most active ZIP codes in the country were in small Pennsylvania towns, most likely because a few heavy sellers live there.
But Dibbell wanted more information on who the buyers were and where they lived.
"Another myth waiting to be broken down (about real-money trading) is that the people who buy this stuff are well-off dentists," Dibbell said. "My experience as a seller was I had a lot of working-class buyers."
Still, he was glad to see some myths around real-money trading deflated.
"The main one being that it's going to ruin the game if you institutionalize it," Dibbell said. "Well, obviously, that's not reflected in this report."
See more CNET content tagged:
goods, experiment, transaction, EverQuest, asset
5 years ago, the profit margin of RMT business used to be unbelievable high (nearly 80 percent) when some pioneers put their virtual items on eBay for trading the real money. Many people just left after making a fortune from selling virtual items and some stayed. Those who stayed created several virtual item exchange services, allowing gamers to buy and sell in-game currencies, items, and even accounts.
When more and more gamers got tired of tedious monster-killing type of power leveling work and were willing to buy virtual item in real money in order to better enjoy gaming experiences, many new companies (such as Thsale.com, Swagvault.com and Itemrate.com)joined the RMT business. Like any other businesses, since then, the profit margin dropped down immediately because of the competition and the battles between those middlemen were never ending.
IGE, a leading services provider to the MMOG community, best known for its virtual item exchange services and its interesting M&A stories, used to be the dominated player in the RMT market. Like IBM in the computer hardware and service industries back to early 90?s, IGE had almost 60 percent RMT market share and its monthly revenue ever reached $9 Million in 2006, more than the combination of the latter comers such as Thsale.com, Swagvault.com and Itemrate.com.
However, things have changed since 2007. For the managing problem and its historical debt issues, IGE started to quickly lose its market share in RMT market. There have been many lawsuits against IGE and its management team. Somehow they stopped to pay millions of dollars virtual items payment to their suppliers after receiving the virtual goods since February, 2007. As a result, many suppliers had to wait at IGE?s Shanghai office everyday asking for the money they deserved. In April 2007, Brock Pierce, the founder of IGE left the company and the company was sold out to Atlas, a company founded by several previous share holders of Affinity Media, the parent company of IGE. The first thing Atlas needed to deal with was to pay back the debt IGE left over.
Since then, the new IGE could never gain the trusts back from their suppliers and customers. Its Shanghai office was shut down in a few months and its Chinese website (the major channel to get suppliers and their virtual currency and items) was removed thereafter.
At the meanwhile, Thsale.com and Itemrate.com have taken over the market shares IGE left. After acquiring Itemrate.com, Thsale.com now becomes the largest provider in the RMT business. With 300+ employees all over the world, Thsale.com seems to be the most trustful and reliable service provider in the North America and Europe.
However, Thsale has not reached the level IGE ever achieved yet although it seems they do have the potentials. They need to make sure they won?t repeat IGE?s failure. After several years? competition, only a few companies survived. Besides the tight market competition, MMORPG developing companies will be continually working against the RMT market. Only those who can provide better, faster and more reliable services to both buyers and sellers can finally stay.
It is survival of the fittest in the RMT market and you never know what?s going on. Maybe at the end of the day, the game developing companies and RMT providers will work together to explore this multi-billion dollars business. Until now, the battle is continuing.
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