Gaming Open Market Closes
By Ian
The experiment in trading online-currencies for real-world ones is coming to a close this weekend. An email from the proprietors of the Gaming Open Market went out early this morning:
"This choice has not been made lightly. However, we feel that closing the L$ market to concentrate on other projects is in the long-term best interests of GOM."
This sounds to me a bit like the usual "split over creative differences" excuse used in filmmaking. The forums speculate, and it would seem logical given a past history of trouble with fraud, that it was just too hard for the operators to keep up with the necessary security/protection measures.
In similar news, World of Warcraft-Europe has decided to make things harder for "gold farmers". Those are the people who play the game through multiple computers for days on end to build up virtual property for the purpose of selling it for real cash. In a sad case, a chinese man was recently murdered over the theft of a virtual good.
Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, have routinely worked to confront the secondary market in virtual goods, with varying success.