Thanks Richard, interesting stuff. Would you say that the downward trend is mainly due to the life cycles of individual MMOs, or is there some more general industry-wide cause that influences all MMOs? If a new MMO is launched today, does the price start up high and slope down rapidly, or do they start further along from the more mature, gently sloping phase?

Perhaps one example of such an industry-wide cause could be a general maturing of the gold farming and secondary market trading industry, reaching a high level of “efficiency” and being able to adapt to new titles rapidly?

Btw how did you collect the data? In my experience the spread in prices between different sellers is quite wide, was this problematic? Although I doubt any errors in measurement can be blamed for the general trend you have observed.

Any explanations for the outliers?