Good virtual economic reads
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 [...]
Blizzard defeats Glider, MDY Appeals
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 [...]
New post on GameRates
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!
Blizzard wins vs. MDY Industries, makers of WoW bot “Glider”
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 [...]
Users moving between virtual worlds
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 [...]
Blizzard ban causes gold prices to double
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]