Why is eBay banning the sale of online-game virtual assets?
Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft and EverQuest claim millions of players around the world. All of these people pay to play, and they spend their time collecting valuable points, artifacts and countless other goods that serve three primary purposes: They make the player feel happy; they allow the player to trade or sell within the online-game marketplace for other goods or services he or she wants or needs; they increase the value of the player’s game character. MMOGs have been around for years, and people spend countless hours online building up their characters’ net worth. What they do with this value tends to stay within the game world itself; however, a more recent development has brought this virtual value into the real-world economy. In the last five years or so, “virtual property” has started showing up on online marketplaces like eBay, where it is sold for real-world money. The Web site IGE (Internet Gaming Entertainment) spe
