Latest news from Korea
(Visited 8028 times) Game talk
Jul 132006
Unggi Yoon on Terra Nova reports that
- “Korean IRS is seriously considering the matters of levingy taxes on RMT”
- “a Korean prosecutor who is in charge of anti-cybercrime division in Supreme Prosecutors’s Office stated that the act of RMT is the violation of korean criminal code §314(Do not distrub other’s business/service), so the traders should be punished and games shoue be kept as game”
As Ted Castronova notes, these do seem like two incompatible approaches. The former also begs the question of whether taxable RMT means that the servers need to up their security and their reliability and their practices and start turning into banks (yikes).
The latter is interesting because it means someone in government is advocating the game side. A game player themselves? Not out of the question, seeing as some new stats are out:
A survey of players of Sun by Webzen showed
- 45.2% over 30
- 24.9% over 40
- teenagers only 15.2%
- 49.3% playing at home
- 37.8% in game rooms
- 43.3% describing it as a hobby or leisure activity (uh… what were the other choices?)
Pearl Research (PDF) says
- that the South Korean game market is expected to exceed $2bn in 2007
- PC based part of the market is $1.2bn of that.
- Casual games (presumably the Korean sort) will account for 30% of that…
- Mobile is growing fast, and predicted to exceed $275m in 2006
26 Responses to “Latest news from Korea”
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I feel like a idiot, but what does RMT stand for? Google say, ‘Recover Memory Therapy’, but I’m getting the idea it has to do with virtual currency. Eh?
“Real Money Trade”, when referencing virtual item sales and trades.
okay…while there may seem to be some incongruency here, i can see both tactics working.
taxing rmt on approved in game channels, such as station exchange (soe’s dedicated servers, with hosted cash transfers) would make sense, both legally, and ethically.
using korea’s laws to punish korean’s who trade in violation of EULA’s (your traditional plat farmer) through the various sites such as IGE, Gameforcash, playerauctions, etc. might give the game companies a foothold that they have been lacking before now.
Ultimately, something clearly needs to be done, for the health of the industry.
sanctioning it, and controlling the money flow is one way, such as sony has done with station exchange. Obviously, up till now, trying to stem the tide of disallowed rmt has not been terribly successful. The farmers are always 2 steps ahead…
Personally, I prefer a concept of a closed economy –
Player to player sales being disallowed. All transactions should be done thru in game merchants – Ie, player a loots sword of uberness, sells it to an in game merchant, receives 1g for it, and the merchant then has 1 sword of uberness in stock, with a sales price of 1.5 gold.
The actual resale value/purchase price can then be modified by the game to control market flooding, inflation, money sinks etc.
Yes, it takes away some of the ‘free market economics’ aspect of many mmo’s, but it also takes away the outside influences of the professional RMT industry, which causes gross ‘mudflation’ in a tactic to drive up sales value, well over the average player ingame income, driving players to outside cash purchases to ‘keep up with the joneses’
bah, i’m ranting.
Either way, it’s good news that Korea is looking at the industry.
We would need far more studies on the long term effects of RMT on a game before a company would be willing to describe it as “interfering” with the intent of having the offenders arrested.
RMT characters are paying money too! It’s hard to make the call if their $15 now is losing $30 for you one year down the road, or more importantly, 5 or 10 years down the road. Could the nature of RMT sellers and buyers actually make you more money in the future by retaining the “working class” of gamer, as well as students who would normally quit as school starts up, but can afford to buy gold/powerleveling and keep up? It’s possible!
Both of these options leave opportunity for new, less legal, players in the game of online currencies. If it goes illegal, currency prices will shoot through the roof and those able to continue business should get rich while the big fish get shut down.
If it gets taxed, you could stand to make good money by dodging the taxes and operating outside of the country, while undercutting the domestic companies that are taxed.
Get your investments ready!
Really, isn’t being against the game rules reason enough to deem RMT illegitimate where those rules exist? I’ve never understood why this was taken any differently from the various purveyors of exploits and bots. Both of them are outlawed in the same service terms.
Developers haven’t had any success fighting RMT on their own, but maybe it could atleast be scaled back to the fringes and beyond with rules carrying the backing of law.
Somewhat tangential question:
Is there anyplace that centrally keeps track of current exchange rates for various MMO currencies?
We used to have http://www.gamingopenmarket.com/ but they shut down.
You could try http://www.gameusd.com/
Bruce
ooh,
finally there may be some country that is saying “disturbing other business” is against the law.. \o/
always have hated RMT in games not designed for it.
Raph –
Do you have a citation for the Webzen info?
The other major “front” in Korea is a move against gambling on game play (see a couple of articles on my blog – http://www.playnoevil.com/).
Game companies are probably going to face inevitable pressure to substantially improve their logging and security practices, just like any other large scale business. It would be wise for the game companies to take the lead on this issue and put together industry “best practices”… or they may face “help” from the government.
Also, this may accelerate the move to Virtual Asset Purchase games where the game company sells everything via small transactions – if the game itself doesn’t generate “loot” that is trade-able, then there is no RMT potential to exploit.
At the current rate of the state of affairs, that would be the World Bank in a few years.
Can RMT be prosecuted under laws against ticket scalping?
I got it from a CLSA email that collects articles from elsewhere — they attributed it to the Electronic Times, but I couldn’t find it in a quick Google.
Aye, that’s where I saw it as well.
I think this is an interesting move. One thing I’ve wondered is whether U.S. companies would have any success by allowing RMT via sanctioned in-game means (a la Station Exchange) and then coming after the 3rd party farmers for tortious (intentional) interference with an existing business contract. I think there’s a way to stretch it to fit.
I’ll be interested to see how the Korean model plays out.
Econo-what?
Sorry crafters!
Puzzle Pirates’ Doubloon system works by forcing every transaction to go through NPC shops, even shops supplied by PC crafters. You have to pay a small real-money fee (each Doubloon costs a dime or two) as a “delivery charge” for your goods. You have both a RMT aspect and an ingame economy aspect — moreso because you can trade map-farmed money (Pieces of Eight) for Doubloons
I still think RMT’s without a company’s permission is similar enough to ticket scalping that the same laws might apply.
Sorry, “Sorry crafters!” may be right. The crafting mechanic may either have to be completely rethought or abandoned if companies can’t get a meaningful handle around the RMT problem.
I suspect if these taxation issues become real, it will be simple decision for game companies. Given the effort to do proper government approved recordkeeping or set up a game system that doesn’t have to worry about taxation issues.
I don’t see the ticket scalping analogy. Everyone agrees that RMT without the company’s permission violates its terms of service (though I wonder how many of you have the same view when you “buy” music or games via digital download and want the right to move or sell them?). Also, most virtual assets are not “finite”.. more can be generated to accomodate the demand – unlike tickets to a concert with limited seating.
Doesn’t taxing RMT open up a huge can of legal worms for both game players and game publishers?
I don’t know Steve. Obviously you spend every day on this type of stuff but, a virtual world without a fluctuating, and at least [b]partially[/b], player-controlled economy does not sound appealing.
I’d like to hope that RMT doesn’t lead us down that path because I’d rather play a game riddled with farmers than one where everything is purchased for a static real-world price.
I usually hate people who make the baseless argument of “it doesn’t sound appealing to [i]ME[/i] so it’s bad!” But, meh.. :/
/shrug. You don’t have to change the crafting system, you just have to change the nature of the player-to-player trading system. As long as each transaction is made in a way that you can skim a form of sales tax from it, it doesn’t matter if the goods are crafted or not.
RMT and the reactinos to RMT won’t kill crafting, just bartering or gift-giving.
thats why i prefer a ‘fixed’ economy, where every transaction goes thru an npc merchant. It’s still a player driven economy, however it would have hard caps on resale values, and take away the ability for the professional farmers to trade goods for real money.
We watched the economy at launch in eq2, and noted some very interesting and devious tactics on the part of the farmers, bots, and their other characters.
They started out with multiple teams of bots, farming zones, bringing in the loot, and starting the cash flow. Their good loot was passed to a seller, who would always price it exorbitantly high (much higher than the general population would price it, or could even afford at that early stage of the game.) Their sellers would also buy up any lower priced loot, and jack up the price on it as well. That starts the inflation on the server economy. Soon those exorbitant prices become the standard, tho most players are struggling to afford anything off the brokers, the player base starts pricing their goods at similar prices.
Now the player base needs 50g for an uber sword, that they cant afford. This drives the demand for in game cash, and starts players looking for rmt sites, who are more than happy to provide the service, that they intentionally caused a demnd for.
A true mmo player run ecomony can and should be run in a closed environment, without such outside influences.
Thats what SOE, Sigil, and Blizzard (and a handful of smaller companies) need to get on top of. Successful closed system economies, would make these games MUCH more fun, if the average player wasn’t driven to outside sources for cash, just to keep up.
Does it make me a bad person for finding fun in controlling in-game economies? You spoke of farmers intentionally raising prices to drive players to buy their goods. In my eyes, that is a healthy economy. That is a capitalist economy.
These types of economies leave room for competition and true economic fluxes. What stops the non-farming player guild from standing up and undercutting the inflated farmer prices? Surely you can’t just say “well, the farmers have too many people.. and… it’s too hard!”, because all that means is that the players just don’t care enough.
And if the players do not care enough to fix it themselves… why fix it for them?
Real-world economies are heavily restricted. These exist to protect average citizens from the often brutal conditions that can appear in the world of business. Just as we try to limit real warfare, violence, and oppression, we also limit their equivalents in business.
In terms of a game world, none of them really support the formation of a player-run governing body. Controls have to be implemented by the developers. Some will be more effective than others, but their inclusion can be justified.
Yeah, wait til some evil economist starts a black market version of a NYSE or NASDAQ for the RMT market. Its actually viable in concept, except for the regulatory aspect would have to be enforced by concensus. Every current mechanisim available in a legitimate stock exchange would apply to this market…..
VGME: Virtual Gold Market Exchange.
I think the RMT market keeps growing faster than before as games get released that support the underlying reasons why people would even need it.
Yes damijin, it IS evil if you try to control the ingame economy. It stops being invisible-hand capitalism and starts being a command economy, no better than a Communist state.
And saying people “don’t care enough” to pour unlimited time and resources into counteracting gold farmers means you’re missing the point about these games — they’re a leisure activity for the vast majority of the players. Turning it into work is a bad thing.
[…] Originally Posted by Necrosaro420 Selling money does NOT RUIN a game. The money is ALREADY IN THE GAME. Its the EXACT SAME as me walking up to my friend bob in the game and giving him some money. NO DIFFERENCE. huh? do you even know what you’re saying? well it is in the game but not available to the players, the player have to get it first. economy 101 More money in a economy, the less value it has, which in turns the more an item cost, also known as inflation… oh and about RMT being from China, I said most are, and it’s true, another country that harvest RMT is Korea, but most are in China… 1.http://www.mtv.com/news/#/games/vide…tml?id=1545919 (watch the video as well if you want) 2.https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/13…ws-from-korea/ […]