San Francisco -- If you're an MMO gamer who buys his/her virtual in-game goods on the black market, your days of shady dealings may be numbered.
A panel I attended earlier this week at the Game Developers Conference's "World in Motions" series suggests that player-to-player item selling is going to be increasingly legit -- whether many MMO players like it or not.
The session was called "Learning to Love Virtual Item Sales." The half-hour presentation was led by Andy Schneider, president and co-founder of Live Gamer, "a legitimate market for virtual trading," and Steve Goldstein, co-founder and president of Ping0, a Live Gamer partner and distributor of Flagship Studios' "Hellgate: London."
Legitimate virtual item sales are common, particularly in free-to-play games, and especially in Korea, where micro-transactions -- the buying and selling of in-game assets and content -- are rampant. But for games that don't offer real-money transactions, like "World of Warcraft" for example, websites like IGE and ItemBay have transformed illicit virtual item sales into a billion-dollar business -- over $1.8 billion according to analysts' estimates given in the session -- and game publishers aren't getting a cent.
Schneider and Goldstein want to change that.