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Old 10-20-2005, 09:56 PM   #8
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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You're thinking of Edward Castronova's 2001 paper, "

It doesn't conclude that EQ's economy was the 9th largest in the world. It did conclude, not completely seriously, that EQ's economy is larger than some small countries. As many economists have since pointed out, and as Edward has recognized, he used a bit of a questionable way to add up the size of the economy.

Currently, the size of the secondary market for items (ie items not sold by the game's publisher) is estimated to be around $880 million (source: Steve Sayler, President of IGE, by far the largest player in the secondary market.) Whether he's right on or not is up for debate, but it is certainly quite large. I believe the Korean government recently published something saying that they believe the size of the secondary market has crossed a billion dollars.

As for buying virtual goods, you do that all the time. You buy a virtual good when you buy the right to watch a movie in a movie theatre. You buy a virtual good when you buy MS Office and download it from Amazon, or a song from iTunes. As the information economy advances over the years, more and more goods will be virtual, since information can be encoded digitally (software, music, etc).

--matt
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