Virtual real estate specialist Anshe Chung Studios announced today that it is preparing to launch a cross-world “virtual financial market” that will allow direct investment across virtual world boundaries. The company, the business brand of Anshe Chung (the Second Life avatar of virtual entrepreneur Ailin Graef) said the venture is the first step toward an […]

The VC-backed start-up Sparter isn’t the only new entry in the real money trading (RMT) industry offering “peer-to-peer” trading. Iron Prairie, which launched in November 2006, also lets gamers trade virtual currency directly with one another and uses an escrow system to protect buyers and sellers. As with Sparter, much of the current inventory […]

When it comes to Warcraft gold, not all servers are created equal. In a detailed study of pricing trends on World of Warcraft servers, GamerPrice.com found a huge differential between the price of gold on game servers in the United States and those in Europe. The study, which was compiled by GamerPrice staff and students […]

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion about yesterday’s post about Sparter, the recently launched peer-to-peer exchange for trading game gold. The new exchange was the focus of a thread on Slashdot and also prompted discussion on blogs covering virtual worlds and real-money trading. Among the commenters was Raph Koster, who most readers will know […]

Sparter is a new entry in the real money trading industry that uses an eBay-like “peer-to-peer” approach for the buying and selling of game gold for World of Warcraft and other MMORPG online games. The company has received venture capital funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and its management includes executives with experience at […]

Power-leveling is attracting increased interest these days, according to an informative story by Daniel Terdiman of C/Net that mentions many of the sites featured in the directory of power-leveling services at Virtual Economies. The growing demand for power leveling services is driven by the expansion of World of Warcraft, which makes it even more […]

Just posted by Zonk at Slashdot, confirming our earlier post on eBay’s decision to halt auctions in game gold, gamer accounts and other assets from MMORPG online games:
Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained that the decision to pull these items was due to the ‘legal complexities’ surrounding virtual property. “For the overall health of […]

The market for virtual add-ons to online video games is slated for substantial growth, according to a study of console and handheld online gaming by ABI Research.
The study predicts that a growing percentage of gamers’ budgets will go towards the purchase of in-game virtual assets such as “maps, game related add-ons, casual game […]

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 […]

In the wake of Linden Labs’ widely-blogged decision to open source the code for the Second Life client (desktop) software, Steve O’Hear at ZDNet looks at a more intriguing possibility: opening the code for the Second Life server grid and allowing virtual worlds to interoperate. The concept isn’t novel, as there have been […]