Julian Dibbell describes The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire founded by former child-star Brock Pierce:
That Pierce lives the life of a former corporate mogul at the age of 28 is remarkable enough in itself. Even more so, perhaps, is that he got here by dominating an industry in which orcs, trolls, elves, dwarves, and minotaurs are major segments of both the customer base and the labor force. That industry is known to insiders as real-money trading, or RMT, and if I tell you now that I’ve made some money in it myself, that’s not because I expect you to take it on my say-so that there are people who might pay as much as $1,800 for an eight-piece suit of Skyshatter chain mail made entirely of fiction and code. Or that there are millions more — players of World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, EverQuest, EVE Online, and other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs, or MMOs) — who have given other players real money in exchange for the virtual weapons, armor, currencies, and other sought-after items around which these games revolve. Or that despite the game companies’ widespread prohibition of such transactions, their number has grown to support an estimated $2 billion annual trade, a half dozen multimillion-dollar online retail businesses, and an enormous Chinese workforce earning 30 cents an hour playing MMOs and harvesting treasure to supply the major retailers.It’s all true, but don’t take my word for it: Just ask any of the world’s 20 million MMO gamers, for whom real-money trading has become commonplace, despised by some as a form of cheating and a blight on play, accepted by others as a necessary shortcut through some of the most elaborate (and time-consuming) games ever made. I’m mentioning my own familiarity with RMT — I spent most of 2003 peddling virtual items on eBay and made, if you must know, a grand total of $11,356.70 — only to establish that I was around before the virtual treasure trade got to be big business.
Which is to say, I was around before Brock Pierce and the company he founded — Internet Gaming Entertainment — made its mark on the industry. I was around before most people in the trade had even heard of IGE, let alone before it became a synonym for virtual currency sales. I was around when RMT as a profession was almost exclusively the province of small-timers like me and the very notion of a multinational, 500-employee virtual-items business doing over a quarter billion dollars in trades was practically unimaginable. And I was around three years later when rumors of a $60 million Goldman Sachs investment in IGE first broke and for a moment it seemed possible that Pierce had a handle on something deeper and more enduring than just a profitable business: the future maybe, not only of virtual retailing but of economic life in general.