Sony scores with Station Exchange

If you play the online game EverQuest II and happen to have an extra Iksar (Fury)/level-50 sage character you don't need, you could soon be $2,000 richer.

That's how much one EQII player got for the powerful, nature-controlling, ancient-language-proficient, reptilian character on Station Exchange, Sony Online Entertainment's official auction system for the game's virtual currency, characters, and weapons.

And judging by the results of Station Exchange's first 30 days of operation, during which the system saw more than $180,000 in transactions, quite a number of EQII players have cashed in on the exchange, which lets gamers trade real cash for virtual items used in the game.

"This is a first for us and a brand-new thing in the massively multiplayer universe," said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online Entertainment. A massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, typically lets a large number of people play a game simultaneously inside an Internet-based virtual world, like the hugely popular EverQuest. "We're seeing players come in, look around, see what they need, figure out how to get it, and pick it up very quickly," he said.

Sony is the first major publisher of MMO games to enter the lucrative world of gaming's so-called secondary markets. For years, however, a vast number of MMO players have bought and sold their virtual battle axes, high-level wizards, and platinum for real money through online exchanges, such as eBay and IGE. By some estimates, the traffic in virtual goods is worth as much as $880 million in real cash every year.

Here's how the exchanges typically work: Because most MMO games let players transfer their virtual gaming possessions, enterprising players can temporarily leave the gaming world to go to the exchanges to use real money to buy and sell their virtual items.

To transfer the fantasy goods, they have to meet up back in the gaming world for the handoff.

Until Sony launched Station Exchange on July 19, however, almost all secondary market trading--though common--was officially banned by nearly all publishers of MMOs in their terms of service or end-user license agreements. Among many reasons publishers cite for these policies is that secondary markets encourage players to use money to reach higher levels of gameplay or to acquire equipment that otherwise would have taken dozens or even hundreds of hours of gameplay.

But with the launch of Station Exchange, Sony ushered in a new era in online gaming: Players who want to partake in such transactions can go to two servers in the EQII network specifically set aside for them, while others can remain on the 54 other EQII servers where such buying and selling is still forbidden.

According to Kramer, the average Station Exchange participant spent more than $70 during the system's first 30 days, and to one observer, that number is the most impressive to come out of the experiment.

"If you think about it, if you had an industry with 5 million active people [as there are in online games] and they spent $70 a person per month, that would be a $4 billion-a-year industry," said Ed Castronova, an expert on the economies of MMOs and a professor of telecommunications at the University of Indiana.

Sony takes a 10 percent commission from each sale and charges a $1 listing fee for currency or other items and a $10 listing fee for characters, according to Kramer. But he wouldn't say how much money Sony is making overall with the new service.

Castronova said the results of the first month of Station Exchange are particularly interesting because the system is run by Sony, one of the largest publishers of MMOs, and therefore could be seen as representative of the industry as a whole.

"I hope it isn't representative," said Castronova, who has long been opposed to secondary market trading in most MMOs because he feels it ruins the purity of gameplay. "I hope what's happening is that people who are interested in going through the game without grinding through it are going to the Station Exchange servers.

"I hope and suspect that that's what's really happening. On the role-playing [non-Station Exchange] servers, it's the best role-playing atmosphere I've ever seen. The theory would be that Station Exchange pulls the non-role-playing people out of the system, and that should purify the gameplay elsewhere," he said.

For its part, Sony said it has no immediate plans to expand Station Exchange to its other MMOs, such as the original EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies, or even to add more Station Exchange-enabled EQII servers.

But Kramer did say that the company is examining the idea of implementing Station Exchange from the get-go into any future MMOs rather than adding it after the fact, as it did with EQII, which launched last year.

Castronova said that most other big MMO publishers are too entrenched in how they run their businesses to try their own versions of Station Exchange. But he said smaller companies may well choose to follow Sony's lead.

"I can tell you that small developers contact me and ask things like, 'Would it be better to do a monthly subscription like everyone else or capitalize on the virtual item trade?'" he said. "People clearly understand that the nature of virtual gaming is changing."