Price Tags on Fun

My personal reaction to Blizzard's plan to legitimize RMT by taking a cut of the profit? "Well, t'was only a matter of time."

Tobold points out the potential amusing irony when "gaming is serius bizness" hardcore l33t players find out that their hourly efforts may only be worth pennies and cents in the larger scheme of world wide Diablo gaming.

Tobold's commenters, being naturally devil's advocate-y, point out the potential amusing irony if the natural set price of virtual shinies turns out to be much higher than we surmise.

How about $10 for a weapon just to be not considered a n00b? (or will a new epithet develop? freep or F2P or GFP for gimpy free player?) $50 for something sharper and more blue-ish colored that gets you on a decent playing field, $200 to be vaguely considered competitive, and stuff worth thousands to be epic, and tens of thousands to be legendary?

It's not like we don't have prior models for reference here. Runescape prices are highly informative. Account selling and item trading on places like ebay have existed since MUDs and Everquest.

All it takes is a critical mass of players to accept it as the set price and voila. And considering the critical mass of players can afford a $50 boxed game, a monthly internet connection, and are used to a $15 monthly subscription, one might be a little bit optimistic in thinking the set price of desirable items will drop to the point of negligible pennies.

Trash items, maybe. But by definition, desirable, prestigious items (luxuries) are things that all players don't strictly need, but some players would love to show them off anyway and can afford it.

If a $25 celestial horse is ok, and still has SOME people buying it, how far off in price can a shiny flaming sword be?

Just today, I read a short article in the Straits Times that there are players in Singapore cheerfully spending upwards of $1000 on Facebook games (It's like every day is a slow news day for ST.) The rest of us can shake our heads, but it just takes one, and then another, and then another and voila, a niche economic market is formed. Most of us will never venture there, but it will be thriving all the same.

Hell, there are wine snobs in Singapore who probably spend more than I earn monthly on wine. There's beer people. Coffee people. Tea people. Gourmet chocolate junkies. Stuff you swallow and convert into organic molecules is just as ephemeral as electrons wafting around someone else's server.

I'm just interested to see how the set prices fall, and how limited the markets will be by region. It would be somewhat stupid to have NA dollars and Euros and what not, imo, unless the servers and game is also limited by region.

Because you know your Chinese Gold Farmer is going to go where the money is, whatever their real region. And anyone can use Google to do a currency calculation and work out the best deal for the dollars.

Unless you region lock everything.

And that's a whole 'nother can of worms.