Does selling items to players make sense for Blizzard and World of Warcraft?
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 [...]
Historical accuracy of video games
There’s an interesting post over at Terra Nova about the historical accuracy of video games. It’s true that most of the video games out today that depict war or other historical sequences are quite far from the actual truth. In a comment on that post I said the following: “I think one of the problems [...]
The effects of botting on the WoW economy
Different people have different opinions on the effects of botting on the economies of MMOs. Most people are familiar with World of Warcraft (probably due to its 11 million subscribers), so let’s take a look at that. Yesterday (May 20th) hundreds of thousands of accounts were closed by Blizzard due to a new detection update [...]
The results of Arden
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/arden-experimen.html#more Kind of an interesting post on the results of Arden, an academic MMO. “At stake here is the entire idea of using virtual worlds as a Petri dish. If fantasy gamers behave in ways that violate our most basic assumptions of economic normalcy, then it makes no sense to use virtual worlds to study [...]
About Me
Hello world! My name is Christopher Armstrong and I’m an undergraduate economics student at the University of Pittsburgh. I’d like to start using this blog to record my thoughts on virtual economics and virtual economies (I have the most experience with World of Warcraft). I am very interested in conducting research pertaining to virtual economies, [...]