“At the time of the alleged offences an offline purchase would cost the purchaser about £2.70 for the same number of gold pieces as would be generated by a £6 bond purchased from Jagex,” the court adds. It also amusingly notes that “the number of gold pieces generated by a bond might take some 15 hours to earn by completing in-game tasks.” Get grinding, gamers.
That “15 hours” number seems misleading, I highly doubt a fresh account can make enough money on it’s own in 15 hours to buy a bond (that gives it ~14 days of membership status). I’m no expert at Old School Runescape, but I’ve tried my hand at some moneymaking and most decent methods require a prior investment of many hours just to make them accessible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average bond grinder has been playing for so many hours that the amortized cost of a bond indeed works out to be around 15 hours of game-play time - though this still only works out as long as at least some people are purchasing bonds from Jagex and then selling them, in-game, to other players for gold.
Only because he sold it as Bitcoin. As long as there is a direct trail to money lost for a company, otherwise I doubt the court would have made such a consideration. This was the second court case regarding it, so the lawyers and the court are definitely making plenty of their salary off of it.
According to this precedent, Destiny stole an incalculable amount of money from its players when it sunset exotics the first time.
Further, being “banned” from a game or having an account deactivated now constitutes destruction of property.
Oh, this is gonna have implications
Since they determined that in-game assets are real property of the player, basically every MMO is gonna need to change their ToS if they operate in the UK, because all of them that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot) have something in there that “All assets are the property of $gameCompany” to stop these kinds of shenanigans. But if all it takes is being able to tie the game dollar to real dollars in a capacity officially supported by the devs… Yeah that’s gonna be some lawsuits
WoW is screwed if they ever need to shut down.
They monetized gold by giving it a real world value. If they shut down I imagine this would mean that players need to be compensated for the value of their “gold”.
If the gold has a real world value, would the value essentially drop to zero if WoW was threatening to shut down? Everybody would be trying to sell and nobody would be buying.
Ah, the power of speculative currency
Yeah I would think so, it only has value based on what you can trade it for.
Almost certainly. I’d say Project Entropia is also screwed, but that is literally a casino of a game, so as long as there are players, they’ll be making money. Second Life is more worrying, though. Both games let you “cash out” your funny money to real money, but Entropia literally functions as a casino, where SL is more like a full economy
As it should. If they allow direct conversion, all they’ve done is create a fungible asset, which already comes with a crazy amount of legal implications compared to some random number in a videogame.
How does this work if an account is banned thereby stripping players of access to their property.
Depends on the Eula or t&c’s. Almost certainly covers the producers/devs.
Vat coming soon to mmo in game transactions.
Already did in ummm… 2014? I bought star citizen ship before vat was introduced lol.
