A brief presentation I gave at Games-As-Services Seminar on March 2nd about the dilemma developers face when balancing between monetization and retention on game design level.

The January 2010 issue of Scientific American carries an article (by me!) that divides the development of gold farming into three phases (pre-history; golden age; and "backlash and beyond"), and examines the phenomenon particularly from a developing country perspective.

The article has been available online at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=real-money-from-virtual-worlds, though may get closed off behind a subscription firewall.

In discussing the ease associated with having someone else do the work of gaming, more often than not large-scale services working to create offline profits like gold farming and power leveling operations are discussed. However, on a smaller scale the in-game economic systems of games like World of Warcraft can also provide players a way to avoid working for the things that they want, while simultaneously allowing other players the opportunity to profit from their in-world efforts.

This came out awhile ago, but Linden Labs has announced changes to the way it operates its online XStreetSL marketplace, a significant player in its virtual economy and source of a wide variety of virtual goods for use in Second Life.

The major change seems to be to the way in which XStreetSL will handle free items, or “freebies”. Despite being given to other residents for free, these items will now have a monthly listing fee of L$99, or about $0.40 USD each. At the same time, other costlier items will be subject to new rates for listing and commissions on the site.

I've published online a spreadsheet of data on the US dollar values of virtual currencies from eight different games, tracked over time from 2004 to 2009. And a Google Motion Chart also for those who like to look at pretty pictures (though this tends to draw attention to the two outliers more than the main deflationary trend).

To be found at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ttEFy433f0C9bJSczaqGw0A&single=true&gid=0&output=html

Richard Heeks

Guest post by Matt Mihaly on how the virtual goods sales model was born.

Matt Mihaly is a CEO and Creative Director of Sparkplay Media and Chairman (formerly founder, CEO, and Creative Director at Iron Realms Entertainment.

The virtual goods/microtransactions model dominates Asia and is now far and away the most popular business model for online games in the West with the meteoric rise in popularity of games on Facebook and MySpace. Twelve years ago, in ’97, I pioneered this model at the company I had founded two years earlier – Iron Realms Entertainment – out of pure necessity. This is the brief history of how the virtual goods model, and soon thereafter the dual currency model, came to be.

My PhD thesis on people who spend real money on virtual goods is now published. Thanks to everyone for your support! Here's the publication info:

Vili Lehdonvirta (2009). Virtual Consumption. Publications of the Turku School of Economics, A-11:2009, Turku. ISBN: 978-952-249-019-3 (printed) 978-952-249-020-9 (electronic) ISSN: 0357-4652 (printed) 1459-4870 (electronic)

You can download the electronic version of the thesis from the university library here. The print version can be purchased from the university's publisher: KY Dealing, tel. +358 2 481 4422, email ky-dealing(at)tse.fi. I also have some free copies to send to people, so drop me an email while they still last!

In the first quarter of 2009, the virtual world of Second Life saw $120 million USD exchanged through user-to-user transactions, with a record monthly $45 million USD in transactions in March. In August alone, users completed 28 830 768 transactions in with the greatest number of these happening around items that are valued at one Linden dollar, or about $0.004 USD [4].

Based on regular economic reports from Second Life developers Linden Lab and raw data files made available on their website, it’s possible to get a basic overview of the economic facts and figures associated with the virtual world. However, one of the questions that is asked on a fairly regular basis – especially by those who are somewhat unfamiliar with virtual world economic systems – is why people pay money for things that exist only virtually.

This is a rough working-in-proggress draft of a figure on how virtual economy design would fit into a business modelling ontology. Please forgive me the graphics quality and harsh colors, they will improve once I recreate it with a proper software :).

Figure on SlideShare.

The model is based on business model ontology developed by Osterwalder et al. (during 2002-2005), best documented in Ph.D. Thesis in 2004. Found here.

I will just leave the figure here as is for now, and later upload the whole thesis with more rigorous documentation and explanations.

The model is not supposed to depict all business related aspects, but
more preciesly the relevant aspects in revenue generation logic through
virtual economy design.

I welcome all comments and discussion.

For those who asked for the slides I presented today at the Virtual Goods Conference, please find them here. Feel free to get in touch if you have any comments.