P2P Currency Trading Service Launches

While I am a fan of virtual currencies and RMT in games, aren’t these services in violation of the TOS for many games?

From Blizzard’s website, here is a section from the terms of service for World of Warcraft:

“Ownership/Selling of the Account or Virtual Items.
Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of Accounts. You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void. Blizzard owns, has licensed, or otherwise has rights to all of the content that appears in the Program. You agree that you have no right or title in or to any such content, including the virtual goods or currency appearing or originating in the Game, or any other attributes associated with the Account or stored on the Service. Blizzard does not recognize any virtual property transfers executed outside of the Game or the purported sale, gift or trade in the “real world” of anything related to the Game. Accordingly, you may not sell items for “real” money or otherwise exchange items for value outside of the Game. ”

I would be interested in doing this if it wasn’t against the terms of service for games that I played, and the language above appears to me to be pretty clearly against selling currency to other players.

Inefficient B2C companies? Without those, there wouldn’t be any “chinese farmers” who actually make the gold so cheap in the first place. They aren’t used-car salesmen who sell John Doe’s stuff with a mark up. They are companies who make globalization work in RMT.

As for the mark-ups, that’s just a matter of competition. And that’s something we provide.

John, this gets back to “is the EULA upholdable”. And in the UK? No, absolutely no way. It overreaches in a major way - you simply cannot agree to set aside all value of your time! It doesn’t matter of Blizzard doesn’t “recognise” it.

You lost me for a bit with the mixed use of definitions - I saw “P2P” and thought “Peer-to-Peer” as in “our underlying technical architecture is more like Skype than like a Web server”, but its “player to player”. Which is way better, b/c using P2P server tech here would be … odd … And I thought there were going to be interesting security questions about trusting the P2P nodes. Nevermind.

So on to the real show - funded by an A list, connected VC like Bessemer, so…w00t…high fives all around. Real interesting that they’d back something that will be used almost 100% for violation of TOS, i.e. breach of contract. I assume Bessemer’s thinking is, “Sure, it might be a breach, but that hasn’t stopped all the B2C versions, not to mention Player Auctions, sooooo, so far that question is answered in our favor. That’s worth an A round.”

PS Sparter’s CEO will be participating in a day long “Virtual Goods Summit” — http://www.vgsummit.com - at Stanford next Friday. I guess I know what I’ll be doing that day.

An interesting point of this is that Sparter’s website claims ’support’ from the games it lists. One game, EVE Online, has uber-strict policies about Real-money Transactions.

Of course, CCP, the developer of EVE, is aware. Should be interesting to see the aftermath of this, be it a large purblicity stunt, or a quiet out-of-court settlement.