Virtual Currencies' Exchange Rate Trends

[gtoprs00 0]

CNet has recently published an article entitledVirtual Gaming's Elusive Exchange Rates, in which they discuss the difficulty in putting a fixed exchange rate on MMORPG coinage. They spoke with the Terra Nova guys, who everyone knows are an academy for virtual economy.They covered IGE and GameUSD.com,a non-commercial research site providing price trend graphs for currencies of most top MMORPGs(Ffxi gil, Swg creditWow gold, Lineage 2 adena, Everquest Plat, Eq2 gold,etc.).

According to the graphs and talking heads, what is interesting is that , ironically, given the dollar's weakness in world markets, in almost every case the games' currencies are losing value against the greenback because of inflation.

[WOW Gold 0]

It is now about 10 months after this article has been written and we can now clearly see that virtual currencies have made a come back in the games that are still adding new users, but not so for the games that have a declining user base.So this all seems to reinforce what the author is saying.But another factor that might be missing is the continued monopolization of the virtual currency providers, as no number goes down so does the competitiveness of their pricing. I look at it like oil prices, when you have one or two refineries supply one large area they can set their own price and force it on the market place.