Last week in the gaming world a real tragedy took place. After the purchase of a large gamer-envious supercarrier known as the Revenant, the owner watched his $9K purchase burn as the pixels disintegrated off of the screen in a player ambush. That’s right, nine THOUSAND dollars invested into a virtual object, gone in minutes. When the EVE Online player purchased the 309 billion ISK (Interstellar Kredits) ship, there were only two others of its size, and was among the highest priced purchases in the game.
(Credit: Games.yahoo.com, CCP Games)
Until, after months of deception and espionage planning from an inside spy, it was blown up. To no real surprise, however, from the game’s community and objective which is centered on buying and destroying spaceships. But this pixel-world of piloting and plundering holds real world currency, and while $9K may seem like a lot to spend on a spaceship, this is far from the first major loss the online gaming world has seen. Within the past year a ship with $6K of real-world money invested into it was also destroyed.
But can you believe people spend these vast amounts of money on online gaming? The world’s most expensive virtual gaming object, a night club on the site Entropia Universe was sold to a fellow gamer for $335,000 in 2010, second to the Crystal Palace Space Station in 2009, a $330,000 sale. The 100+ million players of online games produce $250 million in revenue each year, a far cry from the $7.5 million generated in gaming consoles like Playstation or Wii. But still, that is 250 MILLION DOLLARS going towards non-real objects. A line of code, if you will, that turns pixels into an object that you can never actually touch. That 5$ Coke you paid for with your VISA on Second Life doesn’t even quench your thirst!
I figured this couldn’t exactly be the “norm” of how people play these online virtual world games. According to Nick Lovell of the games-business website, Gamesbrief, only 20% of your players will generate 80% of your revenue. Some games allow you to buy virtual objects for a price to use in the game, while others sell items to fellow players for real-world money transactions, and so cash money trade for electronic currency enables players to work out a value for their virtual possessions. Many online gamers will take extreme guardianship over their online purchases and use them as a way of showing off and representing power.
A common model comes from East Asia, where users are given free access to the online game but are charged for all types of extras. Sometimes in games these extras are purchased with electronic currency on the specific site, which is generated by spending real-world money.
When you think about it, a lot of today’s most popular games are centered on this type of model. Zynga, a leading gaming developer, is responsible for FarmVille (and Words With Friends, among many others), and while the game itself is free, the add-ons or tokens to advance your position in the game can be purchased with real money and make up the majority of Zynga’s annual revenues. These are on a much smaller scale than a nine thousand dollar spaceship, but the concept of trading real-money for e-money to spend on virtual objects remains.
I don’t know about you, but I can think of TONS of things I would rather spend nine grand on than a virtual object made of pixels. SUCH AS: purchasing something more super-powered and tangible like the ability to walk on water, jump over cars or fly around on a jetpack. Plus you could buy all of those things and still have money to eat a real-life hamburger and buy a physical cashmere sweater, which I hear is much softer than the ones the avatars wear.
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