The Funeral of WoW Gold

We know some hardcore “Perfect World International” gamers paid $50 for a mount in the free-to-play Chinese MMO, but an analyst broke down the game’s economic realities and told us how much people spend in an average month.

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People spend $
15 a month to play “World of Warcraft”, but if your MMO content was completely free, as it is in “Perfect World International,” would you pay for items simply for convenience or a unique costume style?

We told you that some “Perfect World International” players spent $50 on a unique mount, but there was the possibility it was a one-time investment. Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson said that’s not the case.

Parker follows Perfect World, the company that runs “Perfect World International,” and told MTV Multiplayer Chinese gamers spend an average of $10 a month on items in the game’s marketplace. These items are optional.

“The size of the market is pretty incredible and ‘WoW’ is also successful there,” explained Wilson. “I would say that there are certainly lots of people who would be willing to pay for this type of content both here and around the world.”

They’re willing to pay in China. Are you?

The9 Ltd. said late Monday its fourth-quarter profit fell by 48 percent as the Chinese online game operator recorded a $3.5 million impairment charge from an investment in an online game development company in South Korea.

The Shanghai-based company, which operates Blizzard Entertainment’s popular “World of Warcraft” game, said net income for the three months ended Dec. 31 fell to $6.5 million, or 24 cents per share, from $12.6 million, or 43 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Revenue fell 4 percent to $59.4 million from $62.1 million.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected a profit of 49 cents per share in the latest quarter on revenue of $64.72 million.

For the full year, The9 (nasdaq: NCTY - news - people ) reported a profit of $51.1 million, or $1.84 per share, up 45 percent from the company’s full-year 2007 profit of $35.3 million, or $1.28 per share. Revenue rose 33 percent to $250.4 million from $187.6 million.

The9 released earnings after its shares rose $1.02, or about 8.4 percent, to close at $13.22. In after-hours trading, the stock fell 92 cents, or 7 percent, to $12.30.

It’s a credit crunch nightmare.

The chief executive of the world’s biggest corporation gets a phone call in the middle of the night. Thanks to industrial espionage, the company has been bankrupted, assets stripped, bank accounts emptied. When trading starts the next day, even the company name will be gone.

If this were real life, the executive might consider jumping out the window. But in the online game of EVE Online, it’s all part of the fun.

“It is another challenge,” said Par Molen, the leader of the “corporation” Band of Brothers (BoB), who got the late-night call.

“That’s what we live for.”

Mr Molen and his online colleagues had spent four years building BoB into the dominant force in a game where 200,000 players battle it out in an online galaxy of spaceships and planets.

Unlike other multiplayer online games like the hugely popular World of Warcraft, which is split into smaller groups, the thousands of EVE players are in it together.

In one virtual galaxy, players build, fight, and trade, joining together to form “corporations” to gain control over sections of the huge starscape.

This creates a complex society where anything can happen, and often does. Rules are few, and all of the lying, cheating and stealing that occurs in real life can also happen in the game.

A player called “The Mittani” is the shadowy spymaster who runs dozens of agents for his corporation - GoonSwarm. He got the call of his career when a disgruntled BoB director contacted him to say that he was thinking of switching sides.

With the director’s access to BoB’s internal workings, the pair were able to disband the corporation and steal all the assets they could lay their hands on.

To add insult to injury, GoonSwarm then re-registered the Band of Brothers name for itself, leaving the former alliance nameless and broken.

It’s a finale that has been compared to “Apple dissolving Microsoft”, and led to some players calling for the game’s developer, CCP, to “roll-back” the game to the previous day and cancel the change.

“Any one director should not have the power to destroy the work of so many people for so many months and years with two mouse clicks,” wrote a player called David on an EVE-related blog.

But CCP is well-known for keeping its hands off action within the game. Since no rules were broken, the changes stood, and thousands of BoB members woke up to a very different world.

Scams in space

This is not the first time that rogue bankers and credit fraud have made EVE Online seem more like the financial pages than a space cowboy video game.

In January, a player absconded with over 80bn ISK, the game’s virtual currency, from an in-game bank. Although the 80bn is only worth a few thousand pounds if exchanged for real money, it represents hours of in-game toil.

In an online echo of the real-world banking crisis, the bank’s chairman issued a statement to calm a run on deposits, writing: “Dynasty Banking will get over these times and we will continue to strive to earn the public’s faith as one of the leading banks of Eve Online”.

Another scam on an epic scale beyond the fantasies of real conmen was perpetrated in 2006, when a player ran off with 700bn ISK from another EVE bank.

“Think of me as a space Robin Hood—steals from the rich and gives to himself,” wrote the perpetrator in an EVE-related internet forum.

Such swindles left some players in awe of EVE’s potential for realism, whilst others called for a stronger code of ethics in the game.

But spymaster Mittani scoffed at calls for in-game morals, noting that without dirty tricks, GoonSwarm would have had no chance of toppling a more established corporation like BoB.

He wrote: “We don’t have any advantages, so we can’t obey your stupid ’space bushido’. We’re going to spy, we’re going to use defectors, we’re going to lie, cheat, steal and be bastards.”

Gamers tend to hang out with friends and family, not random strangers

Massively multiplayer games can be a global melting pot. Hop into “World of Warcraft” or “Guild Wars” and your North American warrior can rub shoulders with an Australian healer.

But more often than not, online gamers are more apt to hang out with people in their neighborhoods than people on the next continent, says a new study. The analysis, which tracked the playing habits of 7,000 people in Sony Online’s “EveryQuest II,” says gamers game with people they know: friends, friends of friends and family.

That’s not to say that people don’t meet new folks playing “EverQuest II,” says Dmitri Williams, one of the study’s investigators. But the research shows that the Internet — and online games — are used mostly as a way to stay in touch with friends and family.

“These aren’t necessarily the new weirdos, these are the weirdos that you already knew,” says Williams, who is an assistant professor of communications at the
University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

It is true that online-game players tend to connect to nearby servers, which results in faster gameplay. But unlike “World of Warcraft,” which has tons of servers to accommodate its 11.5 million monthly subscribers, Sony Online has a couple dozen English-speaking servers and five foreign-language servers for “EQII.” So it’s less likely that players would find themselves randomly playing someone down the street, just because of server distribution. These players, says Williams, are taking their offline relationships online.

To administer the study Williams and three other investigators studied server logs from the game, which were provided by Sony Online.

The logs were divided into three categories: action (what players did and made), interaction (who players interacted with) and transaction (what they bought and sold). The team could tell who was going on quests with whom, who players grouped with, who was fighting what monster.

The National Science Foundation and the Army Research Institute funded the study, but Sony Online gave the research team access to the logs because it was interested in the study’s findings as a way to better understand their players, says company spokesperson Courtney Simmons.

Nothing personal
But Simmons stresses that Sony Online didn’t want to know too much — or let the researchers get too personal. The team didn’t have access to players’ names or any personal information, says Noshir Contractor, another one of the study’s investigators and a social sciences professor at Northwestern University. All the data was made anonymous.

Sony gave the research team the ability to link a survey in the game and an optional battery of questions that asked players how much they played, who they played with, levels of depression and even sexual preferences.

Again, the responses were anonymous, but the team was able to map the 7,000 survey respondents with their actual activity within the game without knowing who the people were.

Players underestimate play time
One finding that isn’t terribly shocking: Players tended to underestimate how much they play. But women significantly lowballed their guesses: Women self-reported, on average, 26 hours of weekly play and their actual average play time was 29 hours. Men, by contrast, were off by only an hour.

Williams says that while there are more men playing than women, women are the hardcore players. “That, to me, was a definite myth buster,” he says. “And then the other weird finding, that the players were healthy.”