UPDATE: The sale of MYMMOshop.com to MY MMO Inc. has recently been called into question. We are investigating this.

The web site MyMMOshop.com has been sold to My MMO Inc. for a whopping $10 million dollars. This is an extraordinary amount for a website, and in a recession no less! We decided to take a look at the value of this site is in VIRTUAL terms to see how much the site would be worth in the world’s currencies that they trade (see spreadsheet below).

My MMO Shop sells virtual currency, in markets with high demand. It is very similar to the currency exchange market in terms of the way they operate, except the the economy is a ficticious one rather than the real world economy.

The site sells virtual currencies from some of the biggest online multiplayer games in the world, and is considered to be in the top 3 “real money trading (RMT)” websites in the world. These Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) have real world virtual economies behind them with.

The company has succceeded with two important tenants: 1. strong anti-fraud initiatives including requiring voice authorization. 2. Excellent 24/7 customer service. These important points have helped to make the site a leader in the space. There economies are substantial, with each currencies essentially ‘trading’ against US dollars or Euros.

Real money trading has not been looked on kindly by MMORPG communities and developers. The purchasing of virtual currency was widely regarded as an unfair advantage to those who had spent a lot of time to develop accounts. Capitalism has prevailed though for good or ill though, the trend has caught on, with the GDP of some games eclipsing those of small countries. Serious gamers now spend thosands of dollars per year to equip their gamers in the now $2 BILLION dollar industry (that’s a lot of WOW gold). The creation of Sony’s own RMT site – Station Cash – has helped to bring legitimacy to the industry that is proving to be recession proof.

As big fans of currency trading ourselves, we decided to take a bit deeper look at the conversion rates So we decided to run some quick calculations to see just how much MyMMOSHop would cost in the games they are trading currencies for. Here’s what we came up with:

Our two favorites – the site would cost:

$391,696,043,869,957.00

Eve ISK’s

and

$17,110,981,828,137.30

Star Wars Credits





**Pricing is based on information from MyMMOShop pricing for highest volume of currency available.

Resources:

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Real Money Trade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.