So why is it that people spend money on online currency? Isn’t it enough that they pay monthly to play the game, why would they want to buy their money as well? Well the answer is linked up with the fact online games gameplay has been turned into the gamers second job. The fact is you need to play so much to be one of the top players it is unlikely you will combine it successful with work or school. This issue has somewhat been addressed with patches and expansion, but when I played I did something called raiding. That is when you go with a group of people somewhere to fight creatures for items and gold. Of course you were bound to die a bit, even more so when learning a new encounter and with that came massive repair bills for your items. And you were expected to bring potions and so on. Everything cost money, but you spent all the gaming time doing the raiding so you had to buy the gold you used or just be really poor. World of Warcraft almost forced the raiding player to buy gold, to some degree anyway.

The virtual currency market will remain as long as online games remain as there will always be people with too little time to get their own currency. It is not overly expensive and you wont go broke by buying making more people do it. You can be banned for it, but it is very hard for the gaming companies to find out which leads to the fact it is after all pretty safe. I do not blame people that buy gold, because the game is to blame at this point. The game is made up in a way you have to spend too much time on everything giving you too little time for anything. And with that it is easy, very easy, to take the shortcut of buying gold.

In a video game, particularly in an MMO, virtual assets are any item in the game world that can be bought, sold, or traded by the players in the game. These assets might include in-game currency, armor, weapons, property, or any other item in the game that is dependent on supply and demand. Many of these assets can be very difficult to acquire in the normal course of playing the game. This is, of course, by design and equates to part of the challenge of life in the virtual world.

There are various reasons people play video games. For many, it is a form of relaxation and for others a way to satisfy a need to standout in the crowd. Either way, acquiring virtual assets is crucial to advancing ones status in the game. As such, just like in the real world, the demand for such items makes them a valuable commodity. As players with entrepreneurial vision began to realize the real world value of virtual assets, we began to see them going up for sale on websites and auction houses. In time, entire companies developed with employees being dedicated to the acquisition of these assets for the purpose of reselling them to other players for real world cash. This trend has now become a multi-million dollar industry operating as a virtual public black market which is in many ways illegal since it violates EULAs (End User License Agreements) and even borders on copyright infringement. In essence a new form of software piracy.

This growing trend is responsible for untold problems for players and game developers. Activities by sellers suck up valuable resources on game servers causing slow performance for players or even eventual crashes. Chat channels in many MMOs are rampant with spam from advertising gold or items for sale which most players find extremely annoying thus reducing their enjoyment of the game and limiting the entertainment value of the product.

Ignorant people try to sell gold like this outright and that is where lawsuits and problems arise. What you instead should be selling, is the access to your work. This access is yours and is free to sell. You are selling the effort you have put into the game, not the game itself which you don’t own. It’s like renting a house. You can rent a house for a certain fee per month which gives you unlimited access to it. You don’t own the house, but you may use it as you wish, but certain rules do apply. You cannot turn around and sell that same house, as you don’t own it, but you can invite others to come over and stay with you and charge them a fee for using the house. So it is with online currency.

One game even took it far enough to make the in game currency equal to “real” currency. Entropia Universe is the only online MMORPG to make it possible for you to not only buy in game currency and items with real money, but sell them and withdraw real money as well, it is erasing the boundary between real and online life one step at a time.

The point is, online currency is slowly becoming another world currency. Just as you can buy American Dollars with Canadian currency and vice versa, you are not actually buying the currency itself. There was a time where a dollar used to be equal to a dollars worth of gold and you could go down to the treasury and get that much gold out. That was the Gold Standard. In this day and age, we no longer adhere to that any more, today we use the dollar as a symbol. The dollar stands for something, but it itself is worthless and unable to be sold. This is the same with in-game currency. By itself, the pixels are worthless; you are selling what they stand for, just like real currency.

So in the end, yes selling the pixels is illegal, just like trying to sell a dollar is illegal, however they are both worthless. What you are selling is what it stands for, a dollar in the real world was made through hard work and effort, you earned it and so when you trade it for something you trade the hard work you put into something for another item. Online you perform tedious activities to earn currency and you can exchange that for something else online. When people buy and sell online currency, they are trading hard work in the game for hard work in real life and vice versa. It all comes down to how you value your time and how much work you are willing to put into something.