Virtual Goods at GDC

Spent the day at LiveGamer's event. Virtual goods now a $6b business. Secondary market at $2b. Growing at 40% per year. Number of people with some kind of virtual world account in high hundreds of millions. Rumor that US states will begin charging sales tax on virtual item sales within the year. See RetailingToday.com, Dan Hansen, Feb. 26.

Comments

[thoreau]

1.

Where in the Hansen article does it say the U.S. may tax virtual item sales?

http://www.retailingtoday.com/editorial.aspx?id=132107

[Edward Castronova]

2.

Sorry - I was blogging tired. The rumor was that the issues in the article were going to become real within the year. The article itself says nothing like that.

[Randy]

3.

MMO developers can learn a lot from social games and how to tie in social pressure that will invoke higher usage of real dollars for the purchase of virtual currencies and goods. Good friend of mine went to GDC SF and wrote an interesting article on this topic http://mmoabc.com/news/what-mmo-mmorpg-games-can-learn-social-network-games.