News Sony's Station Exchange is big hit

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/08/25/Sony_Station_Exchange/

 

Well, 10% of $180,000 is $18,000. Since the average purchase was $70 we can calculate that the number of items sold was around 2,570. Assuming say 5% of these (i.e. 125 items) were characters, the listing fees would be $1,250 for characters + $2,445 for other items.

Total Sony cash = $18,000 + $1,250 + $2,445 = $21,695

Not exactly huge cash but not a bad proof of concept. Bear in mind that the cost of running the platform will be negligible - these players are already paying for the maintenance of the EQ servers through their monthly subscription fees.

If, as Sony (optimistically) suggests, this scales to $4bn a year, then that extrapolates from my broad brush calculation above as $482m a year. Now that is a healthy slice of pie.

 

money!

During my 4 and 1/2 year stint of playing EverQuest 1 I made over £2,000 selling items and plat.

Bearing in mind I was playing the game for raiding and grouping with friends, not being an item/plat farmer like some of the pro's out there who must be raking it in.

My character was tradeskill based so any of the items I found in the world could be turned into something useful and then sold for ingame money or out of game money.

It probably helped I played two characters at once as well, I was a two boxer not EQWindows!

I found the same with Anarchy Online as well people were willing to pay top dollar for money and items, especially that professor jones vest back in the day.

Its only natual that the creators want to try and get a slice.

Theres another MMO out there called Project Entropia (despite its rather law suit based start) where you start off actually converting real world money in PED (project entropia dollars) to set yourself up and then when your loaded in the game you can then transfer it backout into the real world.

 

Station Exchange is a POS. Selling in game items, characters, or money ruins the actual game in the long run. Communities and economies are destroyed because of things like this. Frankly, EQ 2 sucks ******** (compared to what it should have been/promised to be). And this is a major reason. Its one of the reasons I stopped playing.

I won’t touch another SoE project, ever. I hate their 'channel surf' with mmo idea that the president wants for the future. The whole reason EQ 1 was such a success was because of the communities that were built, but all of their future game are, and will be communitiless. I highly doubt any new SoE mmo will ever do as good as EQ 1 did.

I for one am in the Vanguard camp. I have high hopes that they will bring the good things of the EQ 1 era into the future, and improve on the negative.