Gold Selling Outlawed in China

Tony posted this on June 30th, 2009. It has 3 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1916

This news has got­ten a lot of atten­tion so far, and jus­ti­fi­ably so. China has been one of the coun­tries at the fore­front of gold sell­ing and their pres­ence has cer­tainly been felt within LotRO at one point or another. If this law adhered to and enforced, essen­tially all vir­tual “black mar­ket” sales for items, gold, etc. will be offi­cially against the law. I think this best sums it up:

“The vir­tual cur­rency, which is con­verted into real money at a cer­tain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in vir­tual goods and ser­vices pro­vided by its issuer, not real goods and ser­vices,” the Min­istries said.

I’ve noticed that obvi­ous gold spam­ming in LotRO has gone down a lot over the last sev­eral months. It used to be that any given day you’d run into sev­eral of these sell­ers within Bree, in par­tic­u­lar. It didn’t mat­ter what server you were on, Brandy­wine or oth­er­wise. Some­times you’d find farm­ers as well, who were gen­er­ally pretty obvi­ous because they all wore the same thing, ran in sus­pi­ciously tight groups and had sim­i­lar names (Xihu, Xiho and Xiha, for example).

I don’t know that it’s for lack of try­ing, though. Tur­bine has tools to report gold spam­mers (although those weren’t always in place), but I think the main dif­fi­culty for sell­ers has been what I per­ceive is a gen­eral lack of inter­est in these offer­ings from LotRO play­ers. I could be wrong, but the ben­e­fits of buy­ing gold in LotRO just don’t seem as strong as in some other MMORPGs. The game, over­all, doesn’t suit that mind set … par­tic­u­larly when many of the best things in the game (and thus, most desir­able) can’t be bought or traded in the first place.

Obvi­ously defeat­ing sell­ing in China also involves defeat­ing buy­ing as well. I don’t know that this can be under­stated, given how much of the pop­u­la­tion in the coun­try actively plays MMORPGs. It’s a huge mar­ket and this will be a major blow for these com­pa­nies. Richard Heeks at the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter esti­mates that around 80% to 85% of gold sell­ers are based within China.

This is actu­ally very well timed with LotRO’s upcom­ing launch in China. Hope­fully it will help things go a bit more smoothly.

LotRO Going to China This Year

Tony posted this on June 29th, 2009. It has No Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1914

Some­times it’s easy for me to for­get that LotRO isn’t truly a “world­wide” game just yet. It’s still expand­ing even now, with Rus­sia and South Korea being the most recent addi­tions. In some senses I think this is a good thing; the game appears to be pretty healthy con­sid­er­ing all of the mar­kets it hasn’t entered yet.

Tur­bine has appar­ently teamed up with CDC Games to release the title in China, accord­ing to LotRO­Life (via a press release on Earth Times). CDC Games will be the MMORPG’s exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tor in the coun­try. As you might expect, both par­ties are  excited about this: CDC has 13 mil­lion active users for the games it cur­rently han­dles and expects LotRO to get a piece of that. Here’s a bit from the release:

“CDC Games and Tur­bine have been strong and trusted part­ners through the process of local­iz­ing the game and adding major new con­tent to appeal to the dis­tinc­tive China mar­ket,” said Mon­ish Bahl, CFO of CDC Games. “We feel the esti­mated tim­ing of this launch is a good oppor­tu­nity in light of the cur­rent com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment in China, espe­cially with the recent sit­u­a­tion of cer­tain pop­u­lar for­eign titles of this genre. The closed beta test results for the game also are very encour­ag­ing evi­dence of the poten­tial this game holds in the China mar­ket and we look for­ward to a com­mer­cial launch in the near future.

An exact release is not yet announced, but CDC is aim­ing for the “sec­ond half” of 2009. Con­sid­er­ing we’re already in that, I sup­pose it’s anyone’s guess as to when this might hap­pen. My assump­tion would be closer to the end of the cal­en­dar year.