(An) analysis of virtual economies in MMORPG

Abstract

Online game industry grows rapidly in recent day. MMORPG, massively multi-players in online role-playing game, is the most popular genre in online games. Because large number of players interacts with each other, virtual worlds in MMORPG are alike communities of real worlds. Therefore, players in virtual worlds trade game items with real money, like trades between nations. In this paper, we are going find impacts of real-money trading into real worlds, and game operators, using two-period model between players of the game and the game operator. According to the results, we found out that real-money trading benefits game operators, and there exists optimal supply of game items to maximize the profit of game operator. And also we found that the income disparity in real worlds could be decreased when real-money trading is allowed.