Slashdot is conducting a public interview with a company engaged in the shadowy practice of brokering real-money exchanges for virtual objects from games. Last week they solicited questions from their readers; today they posted the answer. This subject just keeps getting weirder and more interesting — I think my story Anda's Game needs a sequel.
Sparter does not buy or sell game items and we don't have an in-game presence. As a result, we cannot know for sure how our sellers behave in the game. But if you believe as we do that the truly damaging behavior is exhibited by the spammers, bot farmers, hackers and dupers, then the more we migrate the market to a true gamer-to-gamer exchange, the harder it is for those folks to profit from their actions.
We designed Sparter to give the gamer every opportunity to compete with the professional seller. They play for love of the game, don't have any overhead, marketing costs or customer service operations. The gamer will always be able to undercut the B2C. There will always be sellers of different sizes, but gamers are selling on Sparter and taking business away from the B2Cs like IGE and peons4hire (some of whom not only spam in-game but, we suspect, are the primary currency outlet for the dupers, hackers and bot farmers). In fact, our typical seller undercuts IGE by 30-40% and is making enough to pay for his WoW subscription.
