f13.net forums - An interesting read on a controversial topic.

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April 19, 2024, 09:02:28 PM

we're back, baby

http://www.juliandibbell.com/playmoney/">This is a blog written by a guy, Julian Dibbell, who set out to prove he could make more in a year buying and selling virtual goods than he could as a writer. His venue of choice was Ultima Online.

It starts back in March, 2003 and as of tax day 2004 he fell around $650 short of his goal. His final outcome was that he could make around $43,000 a year working ebay, buying and selling virtual goods for Ultima Online.

His blog chronicles his day to day "work" and although I've just started reading through it it has captured my interest. I know this is a topic of debate that comes up a lot as to the evil of buying your way to the top but I thought some others may find it of interest as well.

Ahem,

Slashdot

Quote from: Rule #3 on the Rules of Engagement

3. If you're going to post news, don't just ripoff slashdot, the last thing we need is that inbred community of extreme left-wing linux zealots poking around here.

That said, carry on.

Quote from: schild

Ahem,

Slashdot

Quote from: Rule #3 on the Rules of Engagement

3. If you're going to post news, don't just ripoff slashdot, the last thing we need is that inbred community of extreme left-wing linux zealots poking around here.

That said, carry on.

Slashdot: 4:02am April 16th

Wired News: 2:00am April 16th
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63083,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Terra Nova: Unknown Time April 15th
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/04/journalist_earn.html

I leave this thread, dejected and pwned.

Sorry, didn't know it was up on Slashdot. I don't usually read there. A friend sent me the link to the Blog which I'm guessing he got from slashdot.

My bad...

Quote from: UD_Delt

Sorry, didn't know it was up on Slashdot. I don't usually read there. A friend sent me the link to the Blog which I'm guessing he got from slashdot.

My bad...

You didn't have any bad, schild did. If we can't talk about news in here as related to the gaming industry, then we might as well not be here.

I think it's a pretty interesting topic, myself. Even linked to it from my site this morning.

If you can make 47k a year dealing in virtual property, doesn't that sound tempting? But like the man surmised, it's a job that you have to work at, like he did.

But you gotta wonder how many people are right now considering trying it after reading about it this week. =)

Honestly, that's not a lot of money for the effort iinvolved and the risk.

Quote

Honestly, that's not a lot of money for the effort iinvolved and the risk.

Actually I think that 43,000 is quite decent given that he started from nothing and was running a single account and doing this on his own. From what I read it sounded like it took 3-4 months until he built his account up enough to do some serious trading. Take that into account and add a 2-3 more people in working together and I'm guessing someone who does this intelligently will be able to pull in 60k a year.

The only difficulty in this type of thing is the start-up costs. No matter what the game it's going to take some time to build up a character or an account that is going to be profitable. Some games it could take significantly longer than others. I'm guessing there's a much larger EQ market given the size of the game but building a profitable character up in EQ would take much longer than building a profitable char in SWG.

Its also worth nothing that the income is earned completely independent of the local cost of living. $43,000 is a princely income in many parts of the country.

My guess is this guy was small change. I ran into several multi-blacksmith character players while trying to get into the smithy-deed market. I had one GM smith that I was trying to be competitive with at the time.

One guy boasted he had 13 GM blacksmiths that he used to, on schedule, pick up the deeds on the hope that he'd get one of the better ones to sell or make a high priced item (i.e. valorite hammer.) I didn't want to believe him, but after seeing all of the deeds and items he had, it had to be the truth.

One reason for the deed system was to get blacksmiths to work together to put together deed sets right? Wrong. This guy didn't want to deal with me at all. Why do that when he can get real life cash on Ebay? All I had to offer was a different deed and maybe some ingots, you know, ingame items earned through normal play.

This was about the time that I lost interest in UO for good. The next thing that made me kick it was the price hike. I looked at some of the sites that sell items for UO recently and everything is still running like usual with about the same prices (some inflatted some deflated.)

From what I read, UO has degraded into a pay to play more than anything I've ever heard of. And to think, I started to think I'd resub to get that good ole UO feeling back again. I cured myself of that just by looking at the current market for a +25 taming powerscroll.