Acquisition, Retention, Monetization: Final Report 25 Apr 2012 | 10:37 pm

Today’s HIIT Gamification of Services Seminar in Helsinki also doubles as the final seminar of a research project called ARMS: Acquisition, Retention and Monetization in Virtual and Social Spaces, in ...

Seminar on gamification and virtual economy 20 Apr 2012 | 01:04 am

Participate: http://goo.gl/Yff2W Date & time: April 25th | 10:00 – 17:00 Place: Arkadiankatu 28 – Class 4 – 3rd floor – Aalto School of Economics Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT ...

Designing Virtual Currency by Breaking (Almost) Every Rule in the Economics Textbook 16 Apr 2012 | 06:38 am

I’ve neglected to post my Game Developers Conference presentation slides here. The talk was about designing virtual currency. Not how to design sources, sinks or markets, but how to design the actual ...

Linden Lab no longer releasing economic metrics 22 Mar 2012 | 06:11 pm

In recent news, Linden Lab has announced that they will no longer provide their customary annual or quarterly economic reports.  Blogger Tateru Nino reports that Peter Gray, a spokesperson for Linden ...

Loss Aversion in Facebook Games 25 Feb 2012 | 11:08 pm

5-year-old VERN moves to a new platform, links broken 16 Dec 2011 | 04:44 am

The Virtual Economy Research Network website was launched in September 2006, so this autumn we had our fifth birthday! During the years VERN has published hundreds of posts and guest articles by some ...

Gold and guardian cubs: tradable pets and RMT in world of warcraft 13 Oct 2011 | 08:39 pm

With the opening of an online pet store in 2009, Blizzard Entertainment started allowing players to spend offline money for virtual goods in the game World of Warcraft. Now, a new pet option that can ...

Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy: presentation slides 9 Apr 2011 | 06:38 am

I gave a presentation yesterday at the InfoDev virtual economy workshop introducing the Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy report. Here are the slides. Also, The Economist published a nice summary o...

World Bank Virtual Economy report: secondary markets worth $3 billion 8 Apr 2011 | 02:18 am

Last year, the World Bank’s InfoDev programme asked me to write a report on the “development potential of the virtual economy”. The report, titled Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy, is published to...

The Financial Life (and Death) of an East European Gold Farm 31 Mar 2011 | 02:54 pm

Last year I was given access to the financial balance sheet of an East European gold farm, selling on WoW, which allows an insight into income, expenditure and profitability – as well as sales channel...