EQ2 to facilitate buying virtual items for real world cash

In a surprising announcement John Smedley, president of SOE, announced a 180 degree turn on their policy of letting people buy or sell virtual items for real world money. Previously that was forbidden, and could get you banned. In the future SOE will implement "Exchange enabled" servers for EQ2, on which this transfer is not only completely legal, SOE will actually help in handling the transaction. This solves one of the big problems of selling virtual items for real world money, the fact that previously EBay or PayPal had no way of knowing if the virtual part of the transaction took place or not, which enabled a lot of scamming.

John Smedley justifies this change with 3 arguments: First, people were doing this trade anyway, he estimates the volume to be about $200 million per year. Second, players getting scammed in this sort of transaction often took up valuable customer service time, up to 40% of the total. And third, he sees it as an interesting test of future MMORPG business models. SOE is not yet selling virtual items themselves, but that could be the future of a new game.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:39 AM Permanent Link