Buying game currency is a trend that is sweeping the online gaming communities across the globe. In every popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) there is some form of currency in the world in which to buy items for your “character” either for aesthetic reasons or for more practical reasons (armor and weapons, etc). Selling this currency outright is indeed ILLEGAL, as it is not your property at all. That in game item is located inside of the server of some company and does not belong to you, you only pay to access it and use it as you wish on the game.

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.