Previous News11.14.2011 - Terrence Marks:Hey, folks! Hope you had a nice Veteran's Day.I've been playing an MMORPG lately. It's free, but you can buy things with real money. This includes buying things from other players. As such, there is an unofficial but very real exchange rate between in-game money and real money. So while I could, theoretically, spend a few hours working the market every day to amass a fortune, my per-hour would end up being less than minimum wage. That is as it should be.If it were easy to make the equivalent of a part-time job's pay playing video games, more people would do it, increasing competition, and lowering the amount of money you could make. That's how you can tell the difference between a job and a game, usually.
I've mentioned the problems of a game economy before, but I've been thinking about it further. As with most MMORPGs, there are fun parts and there are repetitive parts. I don't care to spend an hour standing around pressing a button just to level up my harvesting skills or suchlike. Now, I could easily pay a few dollars to skip the boring parts and get on with the fun parts. From a purely economic perspective, it makes sense. From an aesthetic perspective, I don't like the idea of paying other people to play video games for me, though. Why not pay someone to play the entire game for me and save me even more time?
When I pay real money for this, I think about the people who get rich - video game rich, not real life rich - from working these markets and I feel like a sucker. I'm the guy who's making them richer a few dollars at a time. On the other hand, there aren't going to be enough exploitable inefficiencies in the market for everybody. I might be able to buy low and sell high and, with patience, make a few dollars. But at that point I'm making even less per hour than I would by playing the game as well as having less fun.
Also that's the difference between Brisbane and Kimberly. And the difference between Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. And I don't have a solution. Right now, none of the options look especially good and each option makes the others look worse. And it's more fun to write about someone making a lot of money that way than it is to actually do it.
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