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PlaySpan: 31 Percent Of Users Sell Virtual Goods
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC]
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October 28, 2009
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In-game currency is the most popular virtual item that players buy and sell from one another, says new data from market research firm VGMarket and monetization platform PlaySpan.
The two companies looked at 2,425 PlaySpan customers and found two out of three sellers have sold in-game currency to another player over the last year -- and earned an average of $22 for their transactions.
According to the companies' data, virtual goods sales are more common on social networks, where one out of two users has sold something on a social network game over the past year, earning an average of $50. In free-to-play online games, one out of four users have made a sale over the past year.
But the median earning of sellers in free-to-play titles is nearly double that of social network gamers at $98, according to VGMarket and PlaySpan's research.
Of the total number of respondents, 31 percent said they'd sold digital goods before, and 39 of the remainder said they were either interested or very interested in giving it a try. PlaySpan and VGMarket says that by demographic, 89 percent of the sellers were male with the average age of 21 and an annual income of $30,000.
VGMarket president Michael Gluck noted, "It’s not only the type of item and genre that are deserving of consideration, but the demographic characteristics of sellers and annual dollar amount they are able to generate can provide publishers valuable information about what makes most sense in terms of selecting a business model."
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This article seems specific to user-to-user sales transactions, but it's very much akin to official in-game DLC and microtransactions. FarmVille sells in-game tractors for real-world currency, and a large number of games on XBL/PSN sell in-game content and are highly profitable doing so. I guess it makes sense for users to try and do the same thing, though I think it's usually looked down upon from the game's parent company.
I generally don't buy items online but there was this one case I felt compelled to. I actually played this wretched game, Evony -- a PVP civilization-clone game, our guild was #1 on our server after slowly working our way up and our main competition's leader quit the game but not before sending his entire army at me. After investing a lot of hours in the game, I didn't want to watch 400,000 combined archers take heavy casualties (most of them were other guild member's archers helping me to defend) so I plunked down $10 in order to purchase tokens allowing me to pick up a couple buff items increasing armor and damage by 10%. To put things into context, it takes about 24 hours to build 30k archers in 5-6 cities, so a few bucks was worth saving potentially a long rebuild time.
The things I learned about Evony was that it was a doomed design from the beginning with a player life expectancy not to exceed 6 weeks if you do well at the game (you hit the end and get bored), but that's another topic.
Also back in the late 90s, I was playing Everquest and someone showed me a game-dev article about how successful people were selling EQ items on Ebay. I couldn't believe people would actually pay for virtual items, so I decided to test it out myself. I had a lot of income potential as an enchanter and a jewelcrafter so I farmed some rare loot, and ebayed it. It actually destroyed the game for me and I made about $5500USD over a space of a couple months. Scary stuff. I quit the game and ebayed my character before I got caught and banned. The person that purchased my account paid over $2000 for it and when I asked why she would buy my account -- I was really curious, the answer was simple. I'm a very busy person and don't have the time to level up a new character and the enchanter was the class she really wanted to play. So there you have it!