Mashable reports on a new service that finally gives gamers what they want- a free economy of sorts. Backed with $24 million in VC from Charles River Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and Pequot Ventures, LiveGamer went live targeting MMOGs with a platform to trade virtual goods. Andrew Schneider and Mitch Davis, (ad startup Massive sold to Microsoft) Live Gamer brings a sense of respectability to trading virtual goods. Suddenly that +3 Vorpal Blade of Troll Slaying takes on new and potent economic meaning.

It seems odd that eBay, which powers the land auctions for Second Life, missed out on this incredibly lucrative opportunity. Surely the thought of selling your Blood Rage Armor is no more ridiculous than when Ebay was a simple script designed to pawn off a pez dispenser collection. There have been speculations by security researchers (like myself) that the malware industry, to use the term loosely, finds it is easier to chop shop a WoW account than steal a credit card! Perhaps because it is hard to get the cops to pursue a case of a hijacked 60 level mage.

The centralized platform for trading has already attracted the interest of Funcom, GMBH, Sony Online, 10TACLE, Acclaim, and GoPets with more to follow.

According to Live Gamer their vision is founded on four value propositions. The biggest I see is seamless in game trading.

Created in an environment where the game industry meets Wall Street, Live Gamer provides a fully legitimate, publisher-supported virtual trading marketplace with security, convenience, and quality of service to match any real-world market. Access Live Gamer from within the game itself — to conduct transaction backed powerful security and anti-fraud measures. Traded goods become available in real time for uninterrupted game play.

Seamless In-Game Virtual Trading
Players can access the Live Gamer marketplace directly from within any participating game for uninterrupted game play and instant fulfillment.

Guaranteed Delivery
Anti-fraud mechanisms protect both sides of every transaction: buyers are assured of receiving purchased goods, and sellers are assured of receiving payment.

Flexible Commerce
A sophisticated marketplace engine gives players the option of both highest bidder and buy-now transactions.

A Level Playing Field
Live Gamer provides Publishers with a rich set of tools that allows them control and flexibility in managing the in-game economy to preserve balanced game play.

startupaddict.com notes that”

The gamer has a real opportunity to make money with only 10% of the sales price being split between Live Gamer and the publisher with the remaining 90% of the sale price going to the gamer.

I asked a die-hard gaming colleague (let’s call him The Impaler), who wishes to remain anonymous, on his take and he summed up his thoughts:

Not a bad thing by any means, but I get an icky feel from it…like it will be mostly power-gamed WoW accounts up for sale…I’m imagining lots of Korean kids wasting away in basements and becoming thousandaires. Really, I think it will be very much like SLX (a Second Life Product Exchange), but cross platform for actual professionally made games. The makers of those games don’t need people to make things for them…they already pay people to do that. This will be like people getting an extra Staff of and putting it up for sale for real money. It happens a lot already, but this will possibly help people sell more, while they take a cut off the top. I don’t see it as being a place for most to make big money, so much as a way to make the countless wasted hours of video game playing turn a small profit. Not a bad thing at all…just not sure I see it turning out to be a big business break for anyone but the folks running the show.

So, the people with their Tokens then take the time to harvest planets that didn’t get defended quite well enough, and restock them with defenses while their hard working people are asleep or at works, or being bitched at by their families to quite being a game junkie. Next thing you know, the hard working folk return to find the last two weeks of time and possibly their own Tokens have been wasted….its addictive and competitive…making them want to buy more Tokens to get back into the struggle.

I asked The Impaler if the addictive quality of games might heighten trading…

We used to call it Space Crack for a reason…

There is even a “Black Market” Token trade there….people who buy them and then wait for desperate people to come and offer up a few planets in exchange for “Just enough for some more fuel”…and they always come back, because the traders are usually partnered with skilled invaders.

The man who created the game is known as “Toonces” by the players…and usually considered to be either God or the Devil depending upon your outlook that day. We always wanted him to replace his ship with an icon of a single colonist…

Space crack indeed…no different than Evercrack? It is no wonder The Impaler was known as either TheWarg or CaptainDastardly depending upon the SGE galaxy.

To that I proffer that the future might not be “professionally made games”. That people will turn to platforms that allow them to make games and games will go independant. Just as we have now have micro content boiling all over the video and audio realms courtesy of YouTube and podcasts, we may, no we will probably, see the same in the games industry. Dusan Writer, who owns a company that does work in advertising, strategy, marketing and design working mainly in healthcare, environmental issues, and training noted my outlook on VastPark, MetaPlace and Second Life in a blog entry.

Yes Dusan I did leave out a swathe of other games and / or platforms. I do not mean to ignore them out of insignificance, but I found the counter strategies of VastPark and Metaplace so similar, and interesting, that I merely wanted to keep my scope narrow. Let’s note the observations by Dusan:

It’s a nice summary, but misses a huge swath of synthetic worlds, not to mention virtual worlds that include elements of games. Ignoring HiPiHi is like the US ignoring China, but there are other worlds with different functions as well. Some of them are glorified chat, and some of them are 3D versions of Web pages. Kaneva, Twinity, There.com, VLES.com….examples of worlds in which commerce and content have different advantages in their expression.

And all of this ignores a move by Google, whose recent move into the Wikipedia space is an intriguing and explosive follow-up to its entry into social networking and wireless.

I am not ignoring anything that Google does, already they have had an impact on intra-game land merchandising in Second Life and those with a background in SMO and good SEO architecture, who understand the nuances of single prim, multi-prim vending with stand alone virtual goods have already started quietly making the shift because they are able to translate 2D marketing principles into a 3D world.

I think anything can be a game and anything can “be gamed”.

For example, I was playing with unicode the other day on twitter and hit on an idea for TwackJack after discovering a chess set and card codes. This line of thinking was based on conversations and this link from with Sam Harrelson on an Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphics translation service. Who would have thought?

Sam is a respected e-commerce expert, CEO of Revenews, and an aspiring Assyriology master. We met by chance in the industry having both read the Enuma Elish. Again- who would have thought? Since then I have been wondering how the constrained spaces of services like Twitter might make us adapt our language to the point where we want or desire pictographs to express complex thought- like cuneiform. Snowcrash anyone?

Ev seemed to like the idea of betting so who knows…maybe one day (C’mon Bleys) you will be brokering out captured Twitter character spaces on Live Gamer…and when people like me have turned a handy micro-chunked communication service into a card game we have either evolved or perhaps moved in retrograde as a species.

I guess it depends on how serious you take it all. At any rate it has to beat the hell out of playing Scrabulous with Robert Scoble, if for no other reason than it underscores how creative gamers and their economies might become.

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