Virtual Economy Research Network

Diablo II is a game released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2000. In the game, the player travels in the world of Sanctuary on a quest to defeat the three prime evils, Mephisto, Diablo and Baal, while fighting their demonic minions along the way. The original game ended in defeating Diablo, and the quest of defeating Baal was added in 2001 as part of the Lord of Destruction expansion.

The game can be played in single player mode, but it was, and still remains, very popular also on Battle.net, where both single player characters and characters stored on the game servers can play online. On Battle.net, an economy came to existence where players can trade items for other items or runes, which are widely used as the currency. For a long time, this economy remained fairly stable, although the price of items in runes continued to grow because of a large number of runes created by cheating.

Last month I blogged about how the virtual Q Coins are being traded for real money and used as an online payment system in China, and how the Chinese government has reacted to this. In the comments section, one Boaz Rottenberg provided some additional details and also offered some disagreeing views. In particular, he wrote:

There is no secondary trade going on in Q Coins in the open market. The currency itself is not transferable through QQ's platform and definitely not cashable by QQ. [...] From my findings, I believe all real money trade in virtual currencies in China is in gaming currencies - mainly WoW gold.

In this posting, I describe how Q Coin secondary market trading (or one facet of it) works in practice, and illustrate the process with some screenshots. I also provide some figures from a trading site. Many people have seen the news articles about QQ, but for most non-Chinese speakers, this is probably the first glimpse of the actual Q Coin market.

Tencent QQ, China's most popular instant messaging service, has been a big interest of mine since I bumped into it in Shanghai. The service works similarly to e.g. MSN Messenger, except that it has a built-in virtual economy based on "QQ coins". Pacific Epoch reports that the virtual currency has now raised legal concerns.

Users can buy QQ coins for a fixed price of one RMB per coin from Tencent. The coins can be used to pay for premium features, such as decorations for a chat avatar. Coins can also be transferred to other users. In addition to the official premium content offered by Tencent, third parties have begun accepting QQ coins as a method of payment for their services.

Those who have been following the RMT scene for some time can probably recall the shady company called BlackSnow Interactive ('BSI'). Like many others, BSI was using computer-controlled player characters ("macros") and vulnerabilities in game code ("dupes") to obtain large quantities of game property very inexpensively. According to Julian Dibbell (Unreal Estate Boom sidebar, Wired magazine, January 2003), they also set up a "virtual sweatshop" in Tijuana, Mexico, where unskilled laborers played Dark Age of Camelot ('DAoC') in three shifts. (See comments below)

In 2002, BSI became famous for suing DAoC's operator Mythic Entertainment over the right to sell game properties outside the game. They also threatened to sue Funcom, operator of Anarchy Online, to retrieve accounts that Funcom had frozen for EULA violations. There was some anticipation that BSI's actions would result in the legal status of virtual property receiving clarification in the U.S.