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RMT, VCs and Business Models, there's been a lot of interesting discussion about yesterday's post about Sparter, the recently launched peer-to-peer exchange for trading game Mabinogi Gold.
The new exchange was the focus of a thread on Slashdot and also prompted discussion on blogs covering virtual worlds and real-money trading. Among the commenter was Raph Koster, who most readers will know from his work with Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Here's Raph's take:
How long will it be until there is an aggregator of Sparter networks? Who knows? What we do know is that the genie is out of the bottle, cates out of the bag, horse out of the barn, and cow over the moon at this point. RMT is here to stay. I agree completely, as I believe the changing audience demographics of virtual worlds/MMORPGs make this inevitable.
Mark Wallace of 3PointD (and a new Terra Novan as well) believes the launch of Sparter "could spell the beginning of the end of the wild-west atmosphere that currently holds around virtual item sales" though conditions will probably get more messy before they get neater." An excerpt: