Sparter, a gamer-to-gamer virtual gold trading site, announced its public beta release earlier today. Users can post offers for their gold across 14 different platforms for buyers to purchase at varying rates based on quality assurance and speed of delivery. The service fills a gap created in January when eBay announced that it would ban auctions for virtual goods in massively multi-player games. "The reason we pushed Sparter forward is that it seems like a lot of gamers clearly value the opportunity to trade currency," Dan Kelly, Sparter CEO told VirtualWorldsNews.com. "It helps them for a variety of reasons. But in the current model, because publishers and developers have chosen not to support that need, consumers are forced to buy through B2C companies. The gamer then pays a lot more than if buying from another gamer. The average gamer saves 30 to 40 percent when buying off a service like Sparter."
"The second reason," said Kelly, "is that it lets the seller have opportunities equal to the big B2Cs. Previously you had to put up a website and have a big customer service infrastructure. We want to give the individual gamer the ability to cut IGE out of the business. That allows the buyer to not only save a lot of money, but it allows the gamer to make a little money by playing the game. That lowers the cost of gameplay, and we view that as very beneficial to the industry. The purchasing power stays in the industry."
The benefits of trading virtual goods aren't entirely accepted. Last month a World of Warcraft player in Florida filed a class action law suit suit against IGE, a major gold retailer, essentially for "substantially diminish[ing] the enjoyment and satisfaction customers obtain" from virtual goods in Warcraft.
However, Sparter conducted research over the last year into why gamers trade for virtual goods, and Kelly finds that their " motivations are pretty understandable and ones we can be sympathetic to. First, they’ve played through the game and now they want to focus their time on what they enjoy most--raiding and not doing the farming of consumables for the hundredth time. They’ve played through the content, and they don’t want to do the highly repetitive things again. Second, they’ve already leveled up a primary character and want a little help leveling up a second character. Third, they’ve fallen behind friends or guild members and want help catching up to people who have more time than they do. They may work or have families, and can only play five or ten hours a week compared to thirty or forty. Buying currency doesn't jump huge levels. It just saves you a little bit of time at the margin."
While it may sound like game design flaws are the major justification for outside trading, Kelly contends that it's just the opposite.
"Bad game design doesn’t engender the secondary market," he said. "Great game design does. Consumers wouldn’t want to spend extra money if they didn’t enjoy the game. Second, if designers want to build a market into the game, we want to help. The economic history is irrefutable that liquid secondary markets increase consumption in the primary market. When you last bought a car, did you think about resale value? Or whether you'd be able to sell it at all? Did it influence you? I'd be surprised if it didn't. If you buy a good within a primary market, you’re more comfortable buying it because it has salvage value on a secondary market. I don’t think that games that build in their own markets will preclude services like Sparter. There will always be a secondary liquid market because it is more visible. We want gamers to trade wherever gamers are gathering. We don’t need to aggregate eyeballs on our website."
In fact, Sparter is more interested in working with developers to provide a market service than necessarily providing it themselves.
"We have thought about [integrating]," said Kelly. "We’re talking to alot of potential partners, developers,and publishers because we think the industry is going to change. We think people will realize that they should build this into their business plan. A number of people recognize that gamer-to-gamer trade of virtual currency is much more beneficial than problematic. We agree that there are a lot of problems that we should work together to eradicate. But if a guy or girl has bought the game and someone wants to give them 10 dollars to trade outside of the game, we don’t think its fair for developers to prevent them from doing that."
In fact, in order for service like Sparter to be entirely safe and reliable, they need to cooperate with game designers to provide receipt verification, explained Kelly. "The thing we can’t do is that we can’t verify that the currency was moved from the seller to the buyer," he said. "We aren’t in game. What we need publishers and developers to do is look and say, 'This is really easy.' Make it easy for us to get a tracking receipt that says the seller sent it to the buyer. If we have that one little piece of verification, that’s the strongest way for us to shut down the IGEs of the world. By not doing that, it forces gamers to go to the biggest, best advertised seller, because that feels easier."
The goal, instead, is to provide an alternative to companies like IGE, though not necessarily the individual gold farmer.
"Companies like IGE buy most of their supplies from workshops set up abroad," Kelly said. "If we give millions of gamers in America the chance to work, any one of them won’t have as much supply, but millions of them will. I want to be academically and philosophically honest about this, though. If a guy in China has the opportunity to work in a field or in a factory or work in an office to play games, I don’t fault him for supporting his family that way. I looked into this a lot because it was one of my first concerns. It’s a working wage that's provided. It’s low for us in America, but it’s a working wage in China. I think people need to be a little more objective and honest. I also feel like there’s a little xenophobia going on with blame directed at these Chinese workers."
Kelly doesn't seem particularly worried about the legal issues of virtual trading that have been raised. He explained that Sparter isn't a presence in any of the games it works for. It has no terms of service contract and it can't spam that way.
When questioned about the class action suit against IGE, he sees it as a "dangerous road [the lawyer] is taking us down by trying to certify a class action lawsuit around the idea that his client’s time in game has value that is being destroyed by other gamers. The industry needs to be clear that gamers do not create property rights by playing a game. His sense could be used by IGE to justify their position. If that wins, the industry loses."
In fact, it's almost obligatory that the industry solve the problem. "It is incumbent on us," Kelly said, "to let gamers do what they want to do and keep it within the industry."
Joey Seiler
www.VirtualWorldsNews.com
joey (at) showinitiative.com
(512) 535-8650
skype: joey.seiler.vwnews
Comments