Sparter: peer to peer RMT network
Via the ever-handy contact form here on the website comes a heads-up from Ding! Grats!? about fresh new venture-funded startup Sparter, which is a new startup in the RMT space. The full scoop is apparently over at Virtual Worlds, Real Profits, which I must add to my blogroll and regular feeds — an entire blog devoted to tracking the RMT industry.
So what’s Sparter doing? Well, it’s running a peer-to-peer network to replace the recently shuttered RMT marketplaces on eBay. Interestingly, it’s also backed by some high-powered folks:
The company has received venture capital funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and its management includes executives with experience at THQ, Walt Disney, Expedia, Ariba and IGN.
At this point, we’re not talking about secondary RMT markets, but tertiary ones. You got some player selling his gold, which lands in the hands of an aggregator/fulfillment service, which uses Sparter or other mechanisms for the open marketplace. There’s mention in the article about how Sparter is talking to IGE and others about their offerings being visible through Sparter. How long will it be until there’s an aggregator of Sparter networks? Who knows. What we do know is that the genie is out of the bottle, cat’s out of the bag, horse out of the barn, and cow over the moon at this point. RMT is here to stay.
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The Virtual Worlds, Real Profits blogs has the news (which I spotted via Raph) about a new player-to-player real-money-trade service called Sparter that has fortuitously launched just after eBay started pulling all game-related RMT from its auctions. The new service is notable for two reasons, and could spell the beginning of
distribution moves beyond mp3 files and on to manufacturable 3D files, the groundwork laid by these sorts of systems becomes relevant to people like me. Besides, I’m not ready to put my eggs into trust systems like some well-paid Seattleites. via Raph Koster’s blog Posted in meatspace, virtualspace | No Comments » February 14th, 2007
RMT Going Mainstream?…
There’s another company looking to fill the void left by eBay pulling their virtual world auctions. It looks like this one actually has some money behind it, and some experienced business leaders.
Virtual Worlds, Real Profits has the story.
Spar…
Happy Valentines Day Raph!
Interesting background the folks have there. I wonder if they’re directly involved or just invested in it?
They seem fairly new (the only game with any activity is, of course, WoW). But the level of activity for that one game is pretty broad. Makes me wonder how long they’ve been in service or if they started up with a warchest inherited from another service that may have closed down.
Oh, der, nevermind on the “seem fairly new” part. Forgot they just launched 🙂
Let Loose the Dogs of Real-Money Trade…
The Virtual Worlds, Real Profits blogs has the news (which I spotted via Raph) about a new player-to-player real-money-trade service called Sparter that has fortuitously launched just after eBay started pulling all game-related RMT from its auctions. T…
Oh my…
Cow may be out of the barn but the question remains, whos going to do the milking? (and are they getting thier milk for free!!!:)
And VC backed? Yikes.
You know once the VC’s get a whiff of the potential profit margin on this all hell’s going to break loose. That TN article re: Red Herring is inter-related to this.
So is the new VC post pitch question:
Got Milk? (aka RMT) in your game design?
Looks like the industry needs a legitimate alternative.
In magnitudes of order this is not so different than Viacom pulling 100k of its videos from YouTube, pilfered content & IP etc.
The sooner Devs/Companies start co-opting the process (therby pulling thier content) and doing thier own milking, and in a way this creates a safer enviornment for the players, the fewer leeches there will be.
PS: Raph theres a category font size issue remaining (font is huge) on the Right hand Column in IE 6, mozilla and current versions of IE seem gtg though.
Care to elaborate? There’s no similarity that I can see.
Sure;
YouTube, enables UGC as well as non-UGC (copyrighted IP content) ala Daily Show from comedy central via upload, and viewing by the community.
Viacom demanded YouTube take down those videos, via a takedown notice.
P2P Enables non-UGC (note this would be different if they were selling SL items wherein the IP is resident owned) copyrighted IP content ala WOW gold and characters to be traded (consumed, sold) among community members.
The difference then, is that Vivendi cannot go to Spartar and demand they take down the gold & item auctions and ban those game accounts, because there is no transparency, in fact maintaining anominity is crucial to thier business model otherwise they are dead in the water.
Therefore, illegal RMT sites IGE, Spartar, sell a game company’s copyrighted content for profit, just as youtube makes money off of advertisers for content that does not belong to them when they allow Daily Show uploads. (which I miss btw 🙂
If Vevendi was seeing some return off the auctions for gold fine, they deserve some residuals, but they arent because selling other peoples copyrighted IP and content is illegal.
This then is the Spar(Naps)ter of RMT.
It does nothing to but hurt game companies and games, and consumers as a result.
Menlo Park 4tw? (Again?)
I think if the game industry thought it could win the legal fight they’d have already acted against IGE and co. I believe they either:
A) Don’t see it as winnable
B) Scared to death what it would mean if they lost
C) Get kickbacks making it profitable to not strangle the goose
D) Scared they might win but that there may be a backlash via legislation
Select any/all that apply
[…] discussion on blogs covering virtual worlds and real-money trading. Among the commenters was Raph Koster, who most readers will know from his work with Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Here’s […]
Real-money trading does not involve the sale of intellectual property. This is where I think you are completely off base in your comparison to Viacom and YouTube and why I cannot see a connection.
The gold, items or whatever, also known as data, are always in the possession of the provider. Ownership of this data is never transferred to players. This data can only be removed from a game service by the provider. Players subscribe to a game service for the right to access and distribute such data in accordance with the rules of the game.
The Terms of Service are not game rules. The Terms of Service govern how customers use the service, not how players interact in the game world. Real-money trading is both an outside and in-game activity. Outside the game world, customers of the provider—buyers and sellers are both customers of the provider—exchange real money for the service of another customer to enter the game world and distribute select data to their account.
An example of real-money trading:
1. You and I are playing Counter-Strike.
2. Your character acquires an Arctic Warfare Magnum rifle from the body of another player’s character.
3. I engage you outside the game, "Allen, I’ll give you US$5.00 if you give me (i.e., my character) that rifle."
4. You agree. You receive US$5.00 outside the game.
5. You return to the game and toss the rifle to my character.
6. Real-money transaction completed.
No intellectual property was sold. No intellectual property rights were violated. Only data was distributed between two players as allowed by the provider. The Terms of Service governed by some providers attempts to control the behavior of customers outside the game. Imagine if a local club of which you are a member declared that not attending or hosting meetings is illegal. The club can punish you by imposing fines that you are not required to pay, suspending your membership benefits, or revoking your membership; however, the club cannot successfully file criminal charges against you for violating their Terms of Service.
Oh then we’re going to disagree fundamentally on where the value lies and who should be recouping the cost of production.
We can agree that a game company would engage a:
Programmer to describe the characteristics and functions of the rifle in the game
Artists to describe the data, it is a rifle, looks like a rifle, not a duck.
Manages the production, distrobution, publishing and marketing of the game, this is the same for a book, a CD, a movie.
Incurs the costs of the network, servers, switches, routers, secures the bandwith, and those Network engineers and Admins that keep things running.
DBA/DB Programmers
Web Designers
Press Relations
etc.
These are all incurred costs of starting, running and maintaining a game. They are the costs associated with the data that describes a rifle or a piece of WOW gold.
That ownership being transfrered is not an issue, because ownership was never “granted”.
As an aside, this is where people get lost in SL, LL grants IP via content creation, it does not grant rights to the transmission, or underlying code of the tool for creation, therfore LL owns all transmission and creation processes, and grants a resident acess to those tool for creation to make flying penises or pointy tinfoil hats to allow for transmissions from the mothership while flogging thier misguided agenda of mistaking grants of creative IP for player rights as regards the grid.
“Players subscribe to a game service for the right to access and distribute such(inside or outside the game?) data in accordance with the rules of the game”
And those rules never encompass selling your toon on Ebay or Napster, er Sparter..
TOS/EULA are not game rules, they are legally binding agreements between a software company (those who create and those who consume) and a consumer to use software in accordance with the intended uses, which are in fact rules embeded into the game design, if those rules encompass an interface allowing for ecommerce enabled transfer of currency and items fine(Station Exchange, Banks in SL), but they dont, which leaves the slimy alternative.
Yes they both pay the game provider, to access thier IP and copyrighted content, exchanging real money, to transfer an item and making money on the backs of the game company and its employees. With further incurred costs associated with bad deals gone awry that 16 year olds who dont understand these concepts clog customer service lines over. (more incurred costs)
If I rip a digitized piece of music off a site and sell it as my own via a third party distributor and make money off the back of the musician, it is by orders of magnitude not that different.
Hey why should I have to pay the guy that created it? And the TOS shouldnt matter I can do whatever I want right? It’s being sold off the channel I used to access it after all….but yes, indeed I can be sued based on copyright infringment.
Im granted access to the bits, to consume, not to redestribute and make cash off of in any channel.
My point is and always has been that RMT is going to happen where design allows for it, as such it should be a function of the game rather than a detrimental and unsavory part of game play that gamers have to put up with. It ruins players gaming experiance when they get spammed though various communication channels with gold farmers selling items, or ganking players to maintain thier farming activity.
On a side note:
I understand and am sympathetic that in some countries this is a legitimate means of employment in an economy with few options. Someone elses ambivalence about thier economy and authoritrain regime is not my problem. That the state allows access to a video game rather than open political discourse is however everyones problem.
That data can never be distributed outside the game. That data only exists within the game world. The game world is like a big container in which water can never escape. The operators permit you to play in the water, but you physically cannot remove the water from the container. The water is always owned and operated by the provider of the container. The data in a game world—those bits and bytes—that comprise the gold and items stay in the game world.
The analogy to music licensing is problematic because customers of a game service cannot legitimately create copies of gold and items that are stored on their home computers. That data is retained on the server. Music licensing is an entirely different issue because music can be extracted from original sources and replicated elsewhere. That duplication does not occur with game objects.
Again, no intellectual property rights are violated when customer-players engage in real-money transactions, and thus real-money trading is not a criminal activity. Engaging in real-money transactions may violate the Terms of Service and the accounts of those customer-players can be subject to suspension or revocation, but since no crime is committed, that is the extent to which these customer-players can be punished by the provider.
For the price of your subscription, you purchase the rights to access and distribute data (i.e., gold, items) in accordance with the rules of the game world. This means—real-money transactions aside—that you can transfer gold and items from your account to other customer accounts inside the game world. In a real-money transaction, all that happens within the game world is that same legitimate transfer of gold and items from your account to other customer accounts. The difference is that the parties to this transfer exchange real money outside the game world.
“Selling your toon” implies a transfer of ownership rights. As a subscriber, your account does not grant you ownership rights to the toon. Because you do not possess ownership rights to the toon, and because the toon is comprised of bits and bytes owned and operated by the provider—from which this data is also inseperable, the phrase “selling your toon” is a misnomer. When you engage in real-money transactions, you do not sell gold. You do not sell items. You do not sell characters. You sell the service of using the game software to legitimately distribute data from your account to other customer accounts.
That is the key difference, legally. YouTube was hosting copywrite-infringing IP-based media content, separate from where that content is supposed to be hosted. In MMOs, nobody takes money or items out of the game client itself. They’re just talking about that money or item elsewhere. Now, if someone wasselling WoW mods using part or many of the assets Blizzard created, then that’d maybe be analogous.
Ultimately, the big point is that the ownership of ingame stuff never changes, as the game owns the stuff, the goods and the characters involved in the trades of them.
That doesn’t legitimize or condemn the RMT industry.
Let’s say that a children’s ball pit is the game world. Of course, instead of children playing in the ball pit, there are adults. Also assume that there are infinite number of balls. If a player decided to charge other players for ball-sorting and ball-retrieval services, would this activity be sanctioned by the players? The activity does not trample anyone’s rights. One player is simply offering to distribute twenty Red Balls, or whatever quantity and color, to your "side" of the ball pit for a small fee. This is basic real-money commerce in the context of a game world.
The game world provides balls in a variety of colors; a closed, safe environment; and the mechanics allow you to trudge around with your legs, wave your arms, grab items with your hands, leap into the air, swim for short distances, and dive into the pit. Money is not part of the game world. In fact, the in-game currency is Balls, and the players value certain colored balls more than others which means that the ball pit effectively has an economy. The aforementioned example of real-money commerce would be equivalent to selling game gold for real money.
What’s more is that the ball pit does not have terms of service. That said, whether real-money commerce in this game world is acceptable is entirely up to the players. There will undoubtedly be players that disapprove and who do not engage in this activity, but there will also be players who do approve and engage these services. Now imagine that the owner of the game world decides to intervene. The owner sets up a rule that says anyone found to be engaging in real-money commerce will be suspended, or expelled, from the game world.
For whatever reason, a segment of customers approved of the activity and actively engaged each other’s services. They were enjoying the game world, entertained by their brokering capabilities, and effectively creating new achievement games in the world for them to play thus capturing their interest and continued participation in the game world. The owner of the game world was getting rich off player loyalty thanks to in-game advertising, and the owner was also able to sell food and drinks outside the ball pit to players who decided to take a break.
But the owner created that rule because a few players complained. The complaints ranged from simple disapproval of the activity to citations of risks associated with black-market Ball transactions. Without consumer protection standards, there was no guarantee that whoever is now called a Ball Trader will actually perform the services for which they received money.
The owner’s solution was to simply make the activity a crime in the game world thus creating an environment in which other players tattle on other players — a new game that revolves around ensuring that everyone is following the rules. Those once-loyal players are now criminals in the game world they helped the owner monetize. This segment of once-loyal players is now a thinning segment of in-game criminals. They are leaving the game world, finding other game worlds in which to play, and are generally helping spread ill word about the owner who betrayed them with a new game experience.
Only because of the unanticipated consequence of not legitimizing the activity in the first place.
I don’t not think RMT is bad, when anticipated by design and sanctioned by the game, it ensures:
1) Safe transactions for players
2) Stable economies in games
3) Source of income for the company hosting the game. Meaning the ROI is shorter, which in turn means that money can be reinvested into the game or a new title, improving the customer experience.
Further your talking about theft, I’m talking about exercising negative rights (the right to exclude others from profiting based on your labor, creative or otherwise)
You’re absolutely right me ripping a digitized piece of music does not diminish your ability to hear the same music and enjoy it. Further me sorting blue balls in a game do not diminish your right to enjoy blue balls. Neither does my hoarding super-rifles-of-doom diminish your ability to enjoy said rifles of doom.
It is not about the container and the bits and bytes therein, it’s about the abstract and real costs incurred during and associated with production of that container and those bits and bytes.
In every example cited above it’s about me restricting your ability to redistribute the fruits of my labor elsewhere for profit. This does not ever matter to people who want to enjoy something for free without paying for it, right up until the point at which they are the ones getting ripped off. Fortunately we have common law in this country to protect people from themselves or rather to protect artists, engineers, companies, and even game developers and publishers from those who would benefit from their work. US economic dominance rests as much on plentiful resources as it does on the right to sue someone who steals from you.
No, unfortunately it is in fact theft, although the only harm is to the company (but who cares about harming the company eh? (even if they employ thousands of people) a guy buying WOW gold for 12.99 again does not diminish my ability to enjoy WOW gold. However as Vivendi incurred the costs of creating WOW gold and operating a game with WOW gold, they can restrict the trade of WOW gold based on IP. What they cannot do is regulate the actions of thieves, and I’m not suggesting they try to, that’s the function of the legal system, because the law is fundamentally premised on the idea that reasonable people will respect the rights of others.
You see when people don’t respect each others rights, there is no rule of law, and where there is no rule of law, people fundamentally have no rights. As a consequence of this wonderful state of nature, people steal from other people, with abandon, and without fear of retribution (usually because there aren’t companies employing thousands of highly skilled people at a living wage)
Therefore, RMT should be anticipated in the design, if not facilitated, however where RMT does occur, and negative rights are not exercised, does not in fact make it legal, and it sure as hell does not make it right, or pleasant for those thousands of other customers who are paying and trying to enjoy a game.
PS: Your right, the example of “selling my toon” on Ebay didn’t quite work, as IP was never granted, and it represents right to access the game, explicit violation of TOS/EULA, rather than selling rifles-of-doom which would be an implicit violation of TOS/EULA.
/cheers
Theft implies that ownership of property is unlawfully transferred.
No such theft occurs in real-money transactions. None. Nada. Zilch.
The property is always owned and operated by the provider. Players never own their characters. Players never own the items they acquire with their characters. Players never own the gold they exchange with merchants and other players. That is all data that belongs to the provider and ownership of that data cannot be lawfully or unlawfully transferred, at least where online games based on centralized servers are concerned (e.g., World of Warcraft.) What players do have is a subscription to a service (e.g., World of Warcraft) that provides their account access to this data. Access is not ownership. Access is a license.
Claiming that real-money commerce is theft is a far, far stretch from the truth.
Maybe we’re miscommunicating, I’m not talking about what the player owns, I dont particularly care what the player thinks they do and do not own, thats an issue at law, not an issue of opinion, and it is premised on a grant of IP/Copyright.
And I’m not argueing who the data belongs to, I know who it belongs to, you know who it belongs to and most certainly gold farmers know who it belongs to. And it is not the players.
I’m not saying access = ownership either.
theft is a denial of ownership rights, if you make music, and your entire library is digitized to a database, and I pay for access to that database, and you have a popular song but it was circulated to your users for a limited duration (yet they could save it to thier profile for personal use, or to share among friends) and other users decide that song would be cool to have on thier profile, and I decide to transfer access to the song to other users via eBay, it does not deny my ownership rights, nor does it impact someone elses enjoyment of the same song, certainly it does not impact you as the creator of the killer Celtic melody 🙂
But can you see where it is appropriation of your hard work? How someone would be profiting off of your IP/Copyright? How selling the efforts of your creation on eBay denies your ownership rights and dilutes possible profit you could have made from selling that song via some mechnisim you designed on your music site?
Because you didnt design a mechanism for your users to trade the rare killer song does not make it right if they sell the song via eBay. It just makes them opprotunistic and given the various choices in occupations available to most gold farmers (or lack therof) hell I’d choose farming gold too.
There is a reason eBay stopped listing RMT sales. Its becasue of liability with digitized media, and issues surrounding IP, otherwise why would they give up what has to be 5m+ in sales fees a year. And if RMT is not theft of IP profits, then Vivendi wouldnt have banned 70,000 accounts in China. And thats ok fans of ripped P2P networks like Napster and Torrent sites who screw(ed) artists out of money have nothing to fear when the RIAA goes knocking at thier local ISP, because ISP’s are not known to roll over on thier customers(?) when faced with supoenas, for thier customers addresses. Oh nooo….
Anyhow I think we’re just spinning our wheels, its a differance of opinion and outlook. Besides I need to go check the sales of my stolen Celtic music and WOW gold :)~~
heheh…
International Game Developers Association, San Diego creates, produces, and markets events and social gatherings for game developers in the region. The events we produce and market have always used content developed by others (e.g., Rory McGuire’s presentation on Agile game development at High Moon Studios, or Raph Koster’s presentation on online worlds.) We do not charge visitors or members a fee for attending our events and mixers; however, if we charged a fee, to call us thieves would simply be off the mark. We provide the service of arranging a venue, providing refreshments, staffing the event, and ensuring that there is an audience willing to listen to the speaker and participate in any relevant discussion. Our organization is effectively in the business of managing and marketing events, and as a service provider, we can legitimately charge visitors and members a fee for access to the offerings provided by our content providers. (By the way, there is no fee for attending our events or social gatherings. Just making that clear to anyone who wants to join us!)
Similarly, real-money commerce is a service business. The game world operator is the content provider. RMT merchants are service providers. The operator provides the content to which people may subscribe for access, and RMT merchants provide a service to facilitate that access. A question of mutual benefit may arise. An event produced by IGDA San Diego provides content providers with opportunities to increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, and establish thought leadership. The opportunities that content providers present us with are increased credibility within the regional industry that strengthens our negotiating position with potential sponsors and other content providers. Our ultimate goal is to generate memberships for the parent organization which benefits everyone in the games industry. These memberships also benefit our chapter by increasing the size and credibility of our social network and thus empowers our grassroots marketing initiatives. It’s a very nice cycle.
RMT merchants facilitate access to content through legitimate in-game distribution of data. RMT merchants facilitate game subscribers’ access to content provided by the game world operator. In comparison with the activities of IGDA San Diego, RMT merchants do not operate that much differently. Sure, they receive monetary compensation for their services, but they are providing a service that benefits the game world operator, the game subscribers, and participants in RMT exchanges.
RMT benefits a game world operator by creating a steady stream of revenue from the subscriptions paid for by both RMT merchants and participants in RMT exchanges. For example, a team of thirty gold farmers each on a different workstation contributes an annual US$5,400 to game subscription income. Participants in RMT exchanges are also—and I’m guessing based on psychology—more loyal subscribers due to the perceived value of their investment in their subscription. If you had invested US$200,000 upgrading your Honda Civic into an elite street-racing machine, the chances of you giving away your investment as a gift to a relative or selling the vehicle for a few thousand dollars would be extremely slim. Investments are usually associated with strong emotional attachments; therefore, participants in RMT exchanges are probably more likely to remain game subscribers and for longer periods of time.
Subscribers benefit from RMT because RMT facilitates their access to content. Some subscribers, however, reject this benefit based on notions of pure play (or experiencing the game as designed) or sometimes because they feel emotionally indebted to the game world operator. Blame marketing and public relations for fostering that sort of relationship with customers. There is, of course, the attitude that RMT as a facilitator of access is actually a way of cheating the game. I understand this point of view, and I can see how RMT can be construed to be cheating. Yet, the fact remains that World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games are not actually games in the traditional sense—they are services that provide access to data. That data is often represented in a way that provides customers opportunities to engage in interactive and compelling experiences. These experiences are intended to hold the attention of subscribers for the purpose of maintaining income from subscriptions. RMT enables subscribers, who might be participants in RMT exchanges, to bypass unattractive content and thus facilitate their access to content that is attractive. While operators do not receive any monies directly from unsanctioned RMT services, the benefit of RMT to subscribers is clearly a significant benefit to operators.
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[…] Sparter: peer to peer RMT network Via the ever-handy contact form here on the website comes a heads-up from Ding! Grats!? about fresh new venture-funded startup Sparter, which is a new startup in the RMT space. The full scoop is apparently over at Virtual Worlds, … Related: • Sparter • peer • to • peer • RMT • network […]
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