Virtual Worlds, Real Profits

eBay has reportedly discontinued all sales of virtual items from online games, according to numerous accounts from traders. This would obviously be a significant event for the virtual economy, as eBay has historically been one of the major methods for traders to sell assets and game accounts.

UPDATE: eBay has now confirmed that it is no longer selling virtual goods. See Slashdot and our follow-up post for more. Additional commentary from Valleywag, Joystiq, Revenews and VTOR.

In his 2005 book Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova estimated that eBay hosts about $30 million a year in virtual goods trading. No official announcement or rationale has emerged, but eBay’s decision certainly reflects the challenges real-money trading presents for corporations. Was eBay influenced by conversations with Sony, Blizzard or other operators of MMORPG games? No one’s saying yet. Some accounts suggest that a high level of fraud in these sales has been a major headache for eBay. Market maker Markee Dragon provided one of the early reports. Here’s an excerpt:

As of 2 weeks ago eBay made an internal decision to no longer allow the sales of video game intangible goods. Stuff for World of Warcraft and Sony games has been getting removed from eBay for a long time. but now eBay has decided to make it a blanket policy. No sales of virtual goods for video games will be allowed. There is no official statement made by eBay on this. But when we called our inside sources they confirmed that this policy went into place about 2 weeks ago. since that time they have been Veroing posters of virtual goods. They estimate that they will have all of the virtual goods removed within the next several weeks.

Obviously, this would be a huge development for the virtual economy. The Broken Toys blog has a screenshot of a chat with an eBay rep that appears to confirm that these sales have been discontinued, but also found some auctions that appear to still be offering game gold. Here’s some commentary from BrokenToys:

eBay’s proactively removing RMT auctions is huge in and of itself. However, there’s another side to this: note the MMO being referenced in the CS chat. Note that UO (Ultima Online) is one of the few MMOs that permit RMT, so eBay removing UO RMT auctions would be… pretty huge. Previously, eBay’s official policy is that they would pull an auction at the original copyright holder’s request. Of course, this then mandated a race between an MMO’s CS department and the thousands of RMT dealers to see who could keep an auction up the longest.

If there has been a policy change at eBay, it would likely be good news for IGE, the market maker described recently in Wired as “the Wal-Mart of virtual goods,” as well as many of the other real money trading marketplaces listed at our Virtual Economies directory.