Are Virtual Goods worth stealing? It's a virtual certainty
If someone told me a few years ago that people would pay real money for goods that aren’t real—virtual goods that only exist in digital form—I would have joked that I had a virtual Brooklyn Bridge to sell them. Well the laugh’s on me if the buzz at the Virtual Goods Conference in San Jose this week is any measure of where the VG industry is today and where it’s heading. There’s real money changing hands for virtual goods in social gaming and lots of people are working hard to figure how to make it pay even more.
If you’re new to the world of virtual goods, here’s a great overview written by Lora Abe, director of marketing for Gambit, a leading payments engine for online games. Gambit’s booth was right next to ours at the conference (thankfully they let us play their pinball machine during the low-booth-traffic intervals).
Game developers strive to make virtual goods integral to the game and valuable to their users so that users will pay real money for them. When real money changes hands for virtual goods, users are buying things that have real (and perceived) value among the population of users. Would someone want to steal someone’s virtual goods? Of course they would. Would a cyber criminal attempt to steal personal data from a social gamer to commit fraud? Yep. What about keylogging, or phishing and spamming social gamers to lure them to malicious sites for the purpose of stealing their private data? Yes, yes and yes.
We were surprised by how many of the people we spoke with at the VG Conference were already familiar with device identification. And those new to the concept of device identification were quick to see its value. Device identification can help keep the fun and profitability in online gaming. With so much effort spent creating social games with compelling virtual goods that drive revenue, it makes good sense to employ device identification to help keep more of that hard-earned real money in your pocket.
If you missed the VG Conference in San Jose, you can catch the VG Summit in San Francisco Oct 29 and 30.
- Tom
