[...] from http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/14/sparter-peer-to-peer-rmt-network/ Via the ever-handy contact form here on the website comes a heads-up from Ding! Grats!? about [...]

[...] Sparter: peer to peer RMT network Via the ever-handy contact form here on the website comes a heads-up from Ding! Grats!? about fresh new venture-funded startup Sparter, which is a new startup in the RMT space. The full scoop is apparently over at Virtual Worlds, … Related:  • Sparter • peer • to • peer • RMT • network [...]

[ENG] Difference between Korea RMT market and global (US) – 1/2…

Okay, you’ve got a 45 inches LCD monitor from the lucky draw which was held in an amusement park. While you are stunned full of astonishment and trying to figure out where you could install this big stuff in your tiny apartment, one person suddenly s…

[...] Sparter: peer to peer RMT network article details » http://www.raphkoster.com Posted 3 weeks and 1 day ago by Raph feed details » [...]

But can you see where it is appropriation of your hard work?

International Game Developers Association, San Diego creates, produces, and markets events and social gatherings for game developers in the region. The events we produce and market have always used content developed by others (e.g., Rory McGuire’s presentation on Agile game development at High Moon Studios, or Raph Koster’s presentation on online worlds.) We do not charge visitors or members a fee for attending our events and mixers; however, if we charged a fee, to call us thieves would simply be off the mark. We provide the service of arranging a venue, providing refreshments, staffing the event, and ensuring that there is an audience willing to listen to the speaker and participate in any relevant discussion. Our organization is effectively in the business of managing and marketing events, and as a service provider, we can legitimately charge visitors and members a fee for access to the offerings provided by our content providers. (By the way, there is no fee for attending our events or social gatherings. Just making that clear to anyone who wants to join us!)

Similarly, real-money commerce is a service business. The game world operator is the content provider. RMT merchants are service providers. The operator provides the content to which people may subscribe for access, and RMT merchants provide a service to facilitate that access. A question of mutual benefit may arise. An event produced by IGDA San Diego provides content providers with opportunities to increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, and establish thought leadership. The opportunities that content providers present us with are increased credibility within the regional industry that strengthens our negotiating position with potential sponsors and other content providers. Our ultimate goal is to generate memberships for the parent organization which benefits everyone in the games industry. These memberships also benefit our chapter by increasing the size and credibility of our social network and thus empowers our grassroots marketing initiatives. It’s a very nice cycle.

RMT merchants facilitate access to content through legitimate in-game distribution of data. RMT merchants facilitate game subscribers’ access to content provided by the game world operator. In comparison with the activities of IGDA San Diego, RMT merchants do not operate that much differently. Sure, they receive monetary compensation for their services, but they are providing a service that benefits the game world operator, the game subscribers, and participants in RMT exchanges.

RMT benefits a game world operator by creating a steady stream of revenue from the subscriptions paid for by both RMT merchants and participants in RMT exchanges. For example, a team of thirty gold farmers each on a different workstation contributes an annual US$5,400 to game subscription income. Participants in RMT exchanges are also—and I’m guessing based on psychology—more loyal subscribers due to the perceived value of their investment in their subscription. If you had invested US$200,000 upgrading your Honda Civic into an elite street-racing machine, the chances of you giving away your investment as a gift to a relative or selling the vehicle for a few thousand dollars would be extremely slim. Investments are usually associated with strong emotional attachments; therefore, participants in RMT exchanges are probably more likely to remain game subscribers and for longer periods of time.

Subscribers benefit from RMT because RMT facilitates their access to content. Some subscribers, however, reject this benefit based on notions of pure play (or experiencing the game as designed) or sometimes because they feel emotionally indebted to the game world operator. Blame marketing and public relations for fostering that sort of relationship with customers. There is, of course, the attitude that RMT as a facilitator of access is actually a way of cheating the game. I understand this point of view, and I can see how RMT can be construed to be cheating. Yet, the fact remains that World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games are not actually games in the traditional sense—they are services that provide access to data. That data is often represented in a way that provides customers opportunities to engage in interactive and compelling experiences. These experiences are intended to hold the attention of subscribers for the purpose of maintaining income from subscriptions. RMT enables subscribers, who might be participants in RMT exchanges, to bypass unattractive content and thus facilitate their access to content that is attractive. While operators do not receive any monies directly from unsanctioned RMT services, the benefit of RMT to subscribers is clearly a significant benefit to operators.

And I’m not argueing who the data belongs to, I know who it belongs to, you know who it belongs to and most certainly gold farmers know who it belongs to. And it is not the players.

I’m not saying access = ownership either.

theft is a denial of ownership rights, if you make music, and your entire library is digitized to a database, and I pay for access to that database, and you have a popular song but it was circulated to your users for a limited duration (yet they could save it to thier profile for personal use, or to share among friends) and other users decide that song would be cool to have on thier profile, and I decide to transfer access to the song to other users via eBay, it does not deny my ownership rights, nor does it impact someone elses enjoyment of the same song, certainly it does not impact you as the creator of the killer Celtic melody

But can you see where it is appropriation of your hard work? How someone would be profiting off of your IP/Copyright? How selling the efforts of your creation on eBay denies your ownership rights and dilutes possible profit you could have made from selling that song via some mechnisim you designed on your music site?

Because you didnt design a mechanism for your users to trade the rare killer song does not make it right if they sell the song via eBay. It just makes them opprotunistic and given the various choices in occupations available to most gold farmers (or lack therof) hell I’d choose farming gold too.

There is a reason eBay stopped listing RMT sales. Its becasue of liability with digitized media, and issues surrounding IP, otherwise why would they give up what has to be 5m+ in sales fees a year. And if RMT is not theft of IP profits, then Vivendi wouldnt have banned 70,000 accounts in China. And thats ok fans of ripped P2P networks like Napster and Torrent sites who screw(ed) artists out of money have nothing to fear when the RIAA goes knocking at thier local ISP, because ISP’s are not known to roll over on thier customers(?) when faced with supoenas, for thier customers addresses. Oh nooo….

Anyhow I think we’re just spinning our wheels, its a differance of opinion and outlook. Besides I need to go check the sales of my stolen Celtic music and WOW gold ~~

heheh…

No, unfortunately it is in fact theft …

Theft implies that ownership of property is unlawfully transferred.

No such theft occurs in real-money transactions. None. Nada. Zilch.

The property is always owned and operated by the provider. Players never own their characters. Players never own the items they acquire with their characters. Players never own the gold they exchange with merchants and other players. That is all data that belongs to the provider and ownership of that data cannot be lawfully or unlawfully transferred, at least where online games based on centralized servers are concerned (e.g., World of Warcraft.) What players do have is a subscription to a service (e.g., World of Warcraft) that provides their account access to this data. Access is not ownership. Access is a license.

Claiming that real-money commerce is theft is a far, far stretch from the truth.

Those once-loyal players are now criminals in the game world they helped the owner monetize.

Only because of the unanticipated consequence of not legitimizing the activity in the first place.

I don’t not think RMT is bad, when anticipated by design and sanctioned by the game, it ensures:
1) Safe transactions for players
2) Stable economies in games
3) Source of income for the company hosting the game. Meaning the ROI is shorter, which in turn means that money can be reinvested into the game or a new title, improving the customer experience.

Further your talking about theft, I’m talking about exercising negative rights (the right to exclude others from profiting based on your labor, creative or otherwise)

You’re absolutely right me ripping a digitized piece of music does not diminish your ability to hear the same music and enjoy it. Further me sorting blue balls in a game do not diminish your right to enjoy blue balls. Neither does my hoarding super-rifles-of-doom diminish your ability to enjoy said rifles of doom.

It is not about the container and the bits and bytes therein, it’s about the abstract and real costs incurred during and associated with production of that container and those bits and bytes.

In every example cited above it’s about me restricting your ability to redistribute the fruits of my labor elsewhere for profit. This does not ever matter to people who want to enjoy something for free without paying for it, right up until the point at which they are the ones getting ripped off. Fortunately we have common law in this country to protect people from themselves or rather to protect artists, engineers, companies, and even game developers and publishers from those who would benefit from their work. US economic dominance rests as much on plentiful resources as it does on the right to sue someone who steals from you.

Again, no intellectual property rights are violated when customer-players engage in real-money transactions, and thus real-money trading is not a criminal activity.

No, unfortunately it is in fact theft, although the only harm is to the company (but who cares about harming the company eh? (even if they employ thousands of people) a guy buying WOW gold for 12.99 again does not diminish my ability to enjoy WOW gold. However as Vivendi incurred the costs of creating WOW gold and operating a game with WOW gold, they can restrict the trade of WOW gold based on IP. What they cannot do is regulate the actions of thieves, and I’m not suggesting they try to, that’s the function of the legal system, because the law is fundamentally premised on the idea that reasonable people will respect the rights of others.

You see when people don’t respect each others rights, there is no rule of law, and where there is no rule of law, people fundamentally have no rights. As a consequence of this wonderful state of nature, people steal from other people, with abandon, and without fear of retribution (usually because there aren’t companies employing thousands of highly skilled people at a living wage)

Therefore, RMT should be anticipated in the design, if not facilitated, however where RMT does occur, and negative rights are not exercised, does not in fact make it legal, and it sure as hell does not make it right, or pleasant for those thousands of other customers who are paying and trying to enjoy a game.

PS: Your right, the example of “selling my toon” on Ebay didn’t quite work, as IP was never granted, and it represents right to access the game, explicit violation of TOS/EULA, rather than selling rifles-of-doom which would be an implicit violation of TOS/EULA.

/cheers

The game world provides balls in a variety of colors; a closed, safe environment; and the mechanics allow you to trudge around with your legs, wave your arms, grab items with your hands, leap into the air, swim for short distances, and dive into the pit. Money is not part of the game world. In fact, the in-game currency is Balls, and the players value certain colored balls more than others which means that the ball pit effectively has an economy. The aforementioned example of real-money commerce would be equivalent to selling game gold for real money.

What’s more is that the ball pit does not have terms of service. That said, whether real-money commerce in this game world is acceptable is entirely up to the players. There will undoubtedly be players that disapprove and who do not engage in this activity, but there will also be players who do approve and engage these services. Now imagine that the owner of the game world decides to intervene. The owner sets up a rule that says anyone found to be engaging in real-money commerce will be suspended, or expelled, from the game world.

For whatever reason, a segment of customers approved of the activity and actively engaged each other’s services. They were enjoying the game world, entertained by their brokering capabilities, and effectively creating new achievement games in the world for them to play thus capturing their interest and continued participation in the game world. The owner of the game world was getting rich off player loyalty thanks to in-game advertising, and the owner was also able to sell food and drinks outside the ball pit to players who decided to take a break.

But the owner created that rule because a few players complained. The complaints ranged from simple disapproval of the activity to citations of risks associated with black-market Ball transactions. Without consumer protection standards, there was no guarantee that whoever is now called a Ball Trader will actually perform the services for which they received money.

The owner’s solution was to simply make the activity a crime in the game world thus creating an environment in which other players tattle on other players — a new game that revolves around ensuring that everyone is following the rules. Those once-loyal players are now criminals in the game world they helped the owner monetize. This segment of once-loyal players is now a thinning segment of in-game criminals. They are leaving the game world, finding other game worlds in which to play, and are generally helping spread ill word about the owner who betrayed them with a new game experience.

Ultimately, the big point is that the ownership of ingame stuff never changes, as the game owns the stuff, the goods and the characters involved in the trades of them.

That doesn’t legitimize or condemn the RMT industry.