NotAddicted has an interesting interview with the proprietor of a stateside gold farming operation which was hit hard by bannings Monday.
[22:35] <Frybread> Do you do those in-game advertisements? Tell spam or group invite spam?
[22:35] <The Botter> no, worst thing ever. If someone wants gold, they can go to the net and find it. I find that in-game spam so irritating, and I’m a gold seller!
[22:36] <Frybread> Then you are the best gold seller ever, thank you for your time.
Rumors had abounded that venture capital had dabbled in the RMT industry before (specifically Goldman Sachs and IGE) but today comes the announcement of a new player: Sparter, funded by Bessemer Venture Partners.
TechCrunch, a dot-com zine, has some analysis:
eBay is one place where gamers currently try to trade virtual currency for real money, but the company started restricting the sale of virtual goods on the site earlier this year, and proactively removing listings that include virtual money and other items. Sparter is simply filling the void that eBay has voluntarily created, the company says.
Others note that eBay left the market due to trademark and other concerns. In particular, it is a violation of the terms of service of many of these services to exchange currency in this way. Whether these virtual worlds will turn a blind eye to Sparter’s activities, or attempt to fight it, remains to be seen.
The comments on the article are a bit, well, vehement.
This whole site is unethical and irresponsible, IMHO. And this article is too. ANY amount of research would have brought up any of these points, which either means you didn’t do any, or don’t care.
According to him, although staying in the Korean player to player auction game, the former owners of IGE really are out of the RMT business:
Oh, just everyone has been so interested in the IGE thing, because IGE is a controversial business. Very controversial, and we’d always kept this incredible differences between the businesses.
If you go to any of our sites, you’ll never see a gold-selling ad. The guys who founded our business, guys like Jeff Moyer and Bill Diaz, they’ve got absolutely nothing to do with that other side of the business.
So for us, it was a positive, in that we thought, for the people who cared, that’s no longer an issue. Since it’s a private company, a private transaction, we’re not releasing actual news on terms. But we’re no longer in that business.
Someone filed a class-action lawsuit about World of Warcraft.
But it isn’t filed against Blizzard. Oh no. Been there, done that. No… this is against…
IGE.
For gold farming.
And devaluing the gold piece.
And throwing Arena matches.
I swear to God, I am not making any of this up. The best part? Given that a key assumption in the lawsuit is as follows:
Because of IGE’s infusion of gold, virtual currency being held by honest Subscribers is constantly devalued. The devaluation of this virtual currency has an economic value in real dollars as reflected on Defendants’ website.
…if this actually moves forward, you could see Blizzard entering into the suit… on IGE’s side. Because as Raph put it in his comments,
Should Blizzard devalue their own currency, would a class action suit appear against them for that? Banking law, here we come…
Cats and dogs living together, me oh my. Making games is certainly starting to get… complicated.
From their community CM comes this:
As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.
With that said, we felt that it was important to share with the community just how serious we are in our efforts to combat this type of abuse. Blizzard has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of Peons4hire, a popular gold-selling organization which many of you have no doubt seen advertised. As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control.
If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic.
While I don’t think anyone at all who’s played a WoW character for more than 10 minutes actually objects to this I’m not sure how they’re doing this legally, or whether this is happening in the US or in peons4hire.com’s home of China. EULA violation? CAN-SPAM act? To quote a Something Awful emoticon, 
Sure looks like it. For those just joining us:
* CCP (Crowd Control Productions) are the developers of Eve Online.
* Eve Online is one of if not the most popular “niche” MMOs, with hardcore PvP and even more hardcore in-game economy.
* As part of that economy, until recently, there was a thriving grey market trade in RMT for ISK (Eve’s currency). The way it worked was that, in the quest for the One True Perfect Game Economy, CCP allowed players to exchange ISK for in-game subscription time.
This effectively made ISK convertible since, of course, you could purchase in-game subscription time for out-of-game currency (you know, the stuff in your wallet). Apparently, this was an unintended consequence. To quote CCP’S “Kieron”,
We allowed the trade of ISK for Game Time as an extension of the policy allowing the trade of ISK for game related services like TS server rental, forum signatures, etc. When we discussed allowing the trade of ISK for Game Time, the thought that we were inadvertently allowing the ‘sale of ISK for RL cash’ didn’t occur to us. The decision to allow the trade was not profit driven.
When Sony came out with their microcharge servers (sale of game items for RL cash), the internal CCP discussion lasted about 2 minutes. The discussion about Second Life’s business model lasted longer, but the results of the discussions were the same. We do not have, nor do we want to have, the ability to clone Tranquility and start up a microcharge server.
That was two years ago. Then a cryptic in-game message of the day appeared this past week alluding to/threatening bans for RMT trading in ISK. Why? Well, apparently things change.
The recent MotD mentioning the sale or purchase of ISK for real money generated some questions about how Game Time can be traded for ISK, Game Time that was purchased with real world cash. In some of my replies, I was unclear. This wasn’t by intention, but because of the information I am authorized to release at this time.
In the future, CCP will introduce a billing solution replacing the current system that allows the purchase of game time from third parties for in-game ISK. In essence, it will be possible for a time and ISK-rich, but financially challenged player to purchase game time directly from CCP. Game Time codes will still be available for purchase, but the trade of game time codes for ISK will no longer be an approved payment option.
We still have a number of details to work out, as well as implementation and integration, but that will hopefully clear up some of the confusion created earlier.
Well (as this ongoing F13 thread points out), that explains almost nothing. However, whenever your community manager uses the words “authorized to release at this time”? That means the players are about to get. Really. Damned. Pissed.
My theory: if CCP were simply to close the in-game currency for game time cards option, that would not make players Really. Damned. Pissed. Therefore, Occam’s Razor applies. What’s the simplest solution in this case? Simple… CCP cuts out the middleman.
Which will have… reverberations. This will make CCP one of the first, and definitely the largest first-party seller of in-game currency in the Western market.
The other rumor F13 posted last week got confirmed. Basically, the web publishing arm of IGE (Thottbot/Allakhazam/Ogaming) sold the gold farming/brokering arm to everyone’s friend in space, Jonathan Yantis.
It’s interesting that running Thottbot apparently makes more money than selling gil in FF11. Or, perhaps, much like porn, there’s a whole lot of competition out there now.
SOE issues a white paper on the Station Exchange one year out. Gamasutra has a copy and interviews John Smedley about it. Sara Jensen has commentary. (As will I when I get a chance to, you know, read it.)
CNet has word that, yes, eBay has banned all RMT auctions… except… wait for it….
Durzy told CNET News.com that the auction giant has decided to specifically exempt Linden Lab’s Second Life from the list of virtual worlds and online games whose auctions it will ban.
“If someone participates in Second Life and wants to sell something they own, we are not at this point proactively pulling those listings off the site,” Durzy said. “We think there is an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game.”
games.slashdot has a raging comment thread already: some are saying it’s due to SL’s extremely liberal granting of ownership of avatar assets to their players. Others, such as Wagner James Au on Gigagamez, call shenanigans – isn’t the founder of eBay on Linden Labs’ board?
So for now, at least, on eBay, RMT for SL content and L$ is A-OK. And this is where things get interesting, because in 2004, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar became a major investor in Linden Lab. Did Omidyar have anything to do with this decision to let Second Life-based RMT slide?
“While Pierre is Chairman of the Board,” Durzy acknowledges, “he does not play a day-to-day role in the ongoing management of the eBay marketplace. This decision was made by our policy team.”
Of course, Ultima Online also explicitly allows RMT, and Ultima Online actions are being actively removed. Guess someone at EA Mythic fell behind on their investment portfolio.
As always, Ted Castronova is there with the punch line:
Castronova said another sign the RMT market has been deemed too risky is that IGE, which does millions and millions of dollars in annual business brokering virtual goods sales, has not been purchased.
“In the long run, blue-chip companies are always going to see this as a rogue market with no future,” he said.
This is significant, and illustrative. IGE’s investment efforts have always been to legitimize their business, whether through funding magazine advertisments, hiring public relations firms both overt and covert, sponsoring tradeshows, buying out community websites, or, most recently, setting up industry trade groups.
It didn’t work.
And as almost everyone involved notes, while IGE and its less adept at English-speaking brethren may see a brief pickup, what will eventually happen is that the gaming companies themselves will step in to pick up the slack. We’re seeing this already in Western games such as Ultima Online and Guild Wars, and SOE has also already announced a future “big project” that will fund itself solely by micropayments. Other companies may follow the lead of Linden Labs and (indirectly, through selling subscription cards for in-game currency) CCP and simply make their currency convertible.
In any event, we live in interesting times.
And just to make this an RMT hat trick day today, Zonk at Slashdot has gotten confirmation from eBay that they are in fact as policy delisting all auctions for virtual property.
Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained that the decision to pull these items was due to the ‘legal complexities’ surrounding virtual property. “For the overall health of the marketplace” the company felt that the proper course of action, after considerable contemplation, was to ban the sale of these items outright. While he couldn’t give me a specific date when the delistings began, he estimated that they’ve been coming down for about a month or so.