The Financial Life (and Death) of an East European Gold Farm
Last year I was given access to the financial balance sheet of an East European gold farm, selling on WoW, which allows an insight into income, expenditure and profitability – as well as sales...
View ArticleWorld Bank Virtual Economy report: secondary markets worth $3 billion
Last year, the World Bank’s InfoDev programme asked me to write a report on the “development potential of the virtual economy”. The report, titled Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy, is published...
View ArticleKnowledge Map of the Virtual Economy: presentation slides
I gave a presentation yesterday at the InfoDev virtual economy workshop introducing the Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy report. Here are the slides. Also, The Economist published a nice summary of...
View ArticleGold and guardian cubs: tradable pets and RMT in world of warcraft
With the opening of an online pet store in 2009, Blizzard Entertainment started allowing players to spend offline money for virtual goods in the game World of Warcraft. Now, a new pet option that can...
View Article5-year-old VERN moves to a new platform, links broken
The Virtual Economy Research Network website was launched in September 2006, so this autumn we had our fifth birthday! During the years VERN has published hundreds of posts and guest articles by some...
View ArticleLinden Lab no longer releasing economic metrics
In recent news, Linden Lab has announced that they will no longer provide their customary annual or quarterly economic reports. Blogger Tateru Nino reports that Peter Gray, a spokesperson for Linden...
View ArticleDesigning Virtual Currency by Breaking (Almost) Every Rule in the Economics...
I’ve neglected to post my Game Developers Conference presentation slides here. The talk was about designing virtual currency. Not how to design sources, sinks or markets, but how to design the actual...
View ArticleSeminar on gamification and virtual economy
Participate: http://goo.gl/Yff2W Date & time: April 25th | 10:00 – 17:00 Place: Arkadiankatu 28 – Class 4 – 3rd floor – Aalto School of Economics Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT...
View ArticleAcquisition, Retention, Monetization: Final Report
Today’s HIIT Gamification of Services Seminar in Helsinki also doubles as the final seminar of a research project called ARMS: Acquisition, Retention and Monetization in Virtual and Social Spaces, in...
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