Avatarnomics: Virtual Currency Is Real (In Korea)
January 13th, 2010
Via The Korea Times, an interesting report that Korea’s Supreme Court has ruled that game currencies can be converted back into real money, unless the game is an online gambling game, such as poker or other card games. From our interpretation, in some sense, the Korean Supreme Court would seem to be using the same […]
Read more »Start-Ups Hedging Their Bets On Online-Gambling Legislation
December 5th, 2009
Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, an article that venture-backed start-ups operating in the three most popular forms of online gambling – poker, horse racing and sports betting – stand to see major impacts from proposals winding their way through Congress that could legalize certain types of Web-based betting. As the report notes: “…While the […]
Read more »Avatarnomics: A Link Between The Economics of Pinball And The Economics of Social Games?
November 27th, 2009
Courtesy of Cheap Talk, an highly interesting look at the economics of pinball and a separate post from Jeremy Liew contemplating whether some of the reasons why pinball peaked and died out (partially due to how pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit […]
Read more »Avatarnomics: Gambling In Virtual Worlds
November 4th, 2009
Via The Virtual Economy Research Network, an interesting review of several new papers published on gambling and econometrics in virtual worlds. As the article notes online gambling can occur in implicit as well as explicit channels online, with Entropia being a specific example since its virtual currency is redeemable for real money (making it, in […]
Read more »Planting A Seed In The App Economy
October 30th, 2009
Via The New York Times, an interesting article on Farmville: “…At high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables. “It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,†Danielle Susi wrote this […]
Read more »Farmville: Keys to Success And Possibility of Planting A MMORPG?
October 21st, 2009
Two interesting articles on Zynga’s Farmville. In the first, Fabric of Folly takes a look at six reasons why Zynga’s Facebook app, a real-time farm simulation game which launched in June 2009 and now boasts over 50 million monthly active users, has been so successful: 1.) Smart leveraging of your social graph (it’s only fun […]
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