Year: 2007

Hmm, policy wonks are starting to notice.

This virtual world of role-playing games presents a number of challenges to US law enforcement. First and foremost, no specific laws apply to it. Second, by virtue of its anonymous and virtual nature, it is nearly impossible to track real money deposited into and cashed out of the game. Third, the challenge of identification is compounded by the fact that neither players nor recipients are subject to any rigorous due diligence beyond the disclosure of an e-mail address, and even that can be spoofed. Fourth, there are no limits on the amount of money – real or virtual – that may be used in the game. Furthermore, since there are no clear jurisdictions, violations of laws are hard to prosecute.Moving funds from one criminal/terrorist to another can work like this: A criminal/terrorist using fake IDs opens a virtual account in an online game. He then deposits real money via an ATM into his virtual account. With his virtual currency he buys virtual real estate from his co-conspirator and transfers virtual payment for the property to the seller’s virtual account. The seller then converts the virtual currency into real money and withdraws it from an ATM.

There’s been interesting discussion on the post about Argentum Online* and on the post about user-created content snobbery about the quality and quantity and potential popularity of user-created MMOs.

To recap, I commented that the barrier to entry for making your own MMO has been falling steadily. Given that just about any player can tell you exhaustively and in great detail exactly how their favorite MMO should be changed to make it 1000% better, this is bound to result in quite a lot more MMOs being created.

Read More “MMO long tails”

You can read about it on the WoW Forums , or catch the f13 thread.

As others have already noted… this is said to be a federal lawsuit… but the company being sued is in China. This could get interesting. 🙂

Just when you think you know about most of the MMORPGs out there, along comes something like Argentum Online, developed on a shoestring budget in Argentina — and celebrating its sixth anniversary! It looks like they are running some sort of server test right now, but the history page describes the game as having peaked at thousands of players. It looks like it was always run for free.

There’s even an Argentum Online 2 in development, though it looks like it is still fairly early in the process.

I think it’s safe to say that the formerly difficult server technology is increasingly less so, at least for staging up a modest game. We’ve already seen exponential growth in the number of MMOs and virtual worlds out there — but once anyone can set one up with fairly little effort, how many will there be?