Worlds in Motion - “Socioeconomics in Online Worlds”
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Presented by John Bates of Entropia Universe, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson Chief Economist of CCP, and Craig Sherman of GAIA.
Some Gaia statistics:
5 million visitors/month, 3 billion page views/month, 1,000 auctions closing daily, 1 million forum posts per day (second only to Yahoo!), $1 million/month in digital goods, and “many thousands of dollars” per day is being made off prepaid cards sold in Target stores.
Gaia is launching an MMO this summer that will be Flash-based. It has been in development for two years and they expect it to almost immediately become one of the top MMOs.
Panelist discussion:
Can a virtual world or MMO exist without an economy? Panelists agree it’s not likely because any time users perceive value in the world, a market will emerge regardless of terms of service.
Things without dollar value still have value. The acceptance of these MMO and virtual world economies will continue. They look just like traditional economics (inflation/deflation, economic utility) just a different currency.
Taxation on virtual world revenue is not really that exciting. When people pull money out of a virtual world, it is income and therefore should be reported as income to taxing authorities.
There will be a fundamental switch to micro-transaction economy in place of subscriptions. This change is well underway in Asia and is starting to happen here in the U.S.
