Searching for a used, level-60聽Gnome聽mage and 500 in WoW gold for new gear? Don't聽bother looking on eBay.
As reported by CNET and other outlets, the online auction giant has announced that it will
no longer accept listings for virtual聽items and accounts for online games like World of Warcraft.聽
With eBay stepping out of the lucrative real money trading (RMT) business, it seems likely that direct sales from RMT vendors like IGE will see an increase in volume. CNET's Daniel Terdiman cites estimates聽that value聽the virtual goods market as high as $880 million annually.
Of the change in course, an Ebay spokesperson said:
Any policy decision we make...has to do with...basically a good buyer experience and good seller experience on the site. We want people to continue to come back, and we want people to have good user experiences on the site.
Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, told CNET:
eBay is a big, well-funded company. If they turn their back on this market, they sense it's not worth fighting (the people who run the games) to keep this going. The other potential fight would be with the government. The Korean government is passing laws that regulate RMT. It seems like maybe eBay is just saying that this is just not an extremely lucrative line of business. In the long run, blue-chip companies are always going to see this as a rogue market with no future.
One MMO, however, gets a pass on the eBay ruling due to its special circumstances. Players of the聽MMO Second Life can
create items and the game's user聽license聽specifies that players own items which they create or possess. eBay's Hani Durzy told Terdiman:
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. We think there is an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game.
Article Source: www.gamepolitics.com.
