SOE Wakes Up! When will EA?

by Alphaville Herald on 20/04/05 at 12:56 pm

The big big story today is not the new Pope, but a decision by Sony Online Entertainment to begin offering a player-to-player market — called Station Exchange — for the sale of in game assets. As usual, the good Mr. Terdiman is on top of the story in wired.com and the bearded ones freely opine on Terra Nova. The bottom line is that SOE simply stopped pretending that the laws of economics didn’t hold for virtual property; they finally pulled their heads out of their asses the sand. The question now is, when will Electronic Arts do the same?

4 Responses to “SOE Wakes Up! When will EA?”

  1. Marsellus Wallace

    Apr 20th, 2005

    Hmmm so the Billion I have access to in SOE… Wonder how much I can get lolol

    Marsellus/JC/Jerzi

  2. Marsellus Wallace

    Apr 20th, 2005

    So this is only applicable for EQ2 and not for like SWG? That sucks!

    -Mars

  3. Moriash Moreau

    Apr 20th, 2005

    I like the “old way/new way” advertisements. The “old ways” are spot-on, save for the fact that black market sales of Sony Online game goods (or at least Everquest goods) are such big business that it’s more profitable for the seller to deliver the promised goods within an hour (usually via paid employees who do nothing but shuffle around L-1 mule alts all day) and exactly as promised. Repeat business is common, especially with platinum piece purchases.

    And, of course, the Sony advertising wonks forgot one:

    OLD WAY:
    We threaten to ban the buyer, the seller, their alts, their pets, and maybe a few of the Druids standing nearby if we catch you. Everyone laughs all the way to the Bank, because it’s impossible for us to catch 99.9% of the black market deals going down at any given time, and banning is a joke to most of the corporate sellers anyway.

    NEW WAY:
    We finally face facts and admit this, and hope you don’t notice that we changed the TOS.

  4. RB

    Apr 23rd, 2005

    EA will not be doing anything because they don’t actually have any virtual property that’s worth anything. TSO is a worthless failure that they are too pride choked to admit and close. So key employees spare their dignity and leave instead.

    UO goods market has been saturated for a very long time. so im not sure how much benefit they’d get out of providing such sales themselves.

    EA just sucks at the internet, and should stick to making offline games. No amount of spin from Mr Brown will change that.

    - RB

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