[MUD-Dev] [NEWS] Gaming Open Market

[ren at aldermangroup.com]

From: Peter Keeler <scion at divineright.org>

> Amid this discussion of selling virtual property, one of the more
> interesting experiments in the field has just been struck a very
> crippling blow. The Gaming Open Market has been allowing trades
> between US dollars and numerous game currencies for awhile now,
> and seemed until today to be steadily gaining in popularity and
> trading volume. They are now victims of some pretty massive PayPal
> fraud and have restricted their markets to solely Linden Dollars.

I've been tracking this story over on TerraNova where you will find
more comments by Jamie of GOM as well as the usual TN crowd (thread
here:

  http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/06/gom_offline.html

I don't think that as a business GOM was 'nearly eliminated' though
with the way pay pal works. Though I think that if a few determined
people really wanted to take down something like GOM, they probably
could, but I imagine that that really would be a crime with non
high-fluting discussion about virtual this that or the other needed.

I've interviewed a few people about item trading in research for my
papers on the subject an I get quite mixed views of the state of the
market. Reading Julian Dibbells' blog Play Money
(http://www.juliandibbell.com/playmoney/) it certainly seems like
streets VW are not paved with gold -- virtual or otherwise.

However other traders and outfits such as IGE (www.ige.com/) do, on
the face of it, seem to be doing pretty well -- maybe it's simply
like many other low margin sectors, the only way to make profit is
to keep the bottom line low and maximise volume.

I think that some sites do provide inter-world exchanges, though
until one can buy physical stuff with VW currencies there will
always be a demand for exchange into physical world currency.

I think the appeal / challenge by GOM (see the TN post) to work with
VW creators on tracking transactions etc. it interesting, and I
wonder if anyone other than Second Life will take up the challenge.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
terranova.blogs.com
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