Many people have played older online games such as RuneScape, Habbo Hotel, Entropia or Diablo when they were younger, but do they actually know that their accounts may hold thousands of dollars’ worth of virtual items? To give you an example, in Habbo Hotel, Runescape and Diablo they often held special holiday events or competitions to win special items that were only available for a limited amount of time. In Habbo Hotel you could win a virtual type writer that was worth quite some money in-game (Habbo Hotel Wiki, 2017), while in Runescape they held a Christmas event in the online world by dropping virtual Christmas crackers all over the map (Runescape Wiki, 2017). In Diablo you could find weapons that were dropped by monsters with a drop rate of 1 in 5 million.
To give you an example of how much this can be worth, a Diablo 3 weapon was recently sold for $16.000 (IGN, 2017), while a Runescape Christmas cracker is worth over 2000 billion gold coins. If you were to buy these gold coins from online websites, this would cost you over $4000.
The thing is though, it usually takes times for items to become valuable. The Christmas crackers were in abundance at the start of the holiday event, but never returned in game. People stopped playing while having these items in the bank, which made most of them disappear. This increased the value of the virtual items. But since the supply of the items will never increase, wouldn’t this mean the price of the object could only rise? There was some research done by an avid gamer, and he found that some items have tripled in value in the last 3 years (G2G, 2016).
So should investing in virtual items be part of your investment portfolio? Well, one of the main problems for stocking in on these items is the demand for the online game. It is partly comparable to the network effects in class. The more people play the game, the more money enters the game, which increases the prices of the most rare and valuable items. As soon as the player base decreases, the items value decrease too. Many people would have never guessed that Habbo Hotel or Runescape would exist for 10+ years, and once the game is not available any more, the items become worthless. So it’s a pretty risky investment, but it might be worth it for the excellent returns.
References:
Most expensive item in Diablo 3 sold for $16k. (IGN). Retrieved October 22, 2017, from http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/most-expensive-item-in-diablo-3-sold-for-16k.452776697/
Habbo Hotel Typewriter. Retrieved October 22, 2017, from http://www.habboxwiki.com/Typewriter
Runescape Christmas Cracker. Retrieved October 22, 2017, from http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Christmas_cracker
G2G A., & Everything, A. F. (2016, April 13). 5 Online Games That Players Invest Heavily On Virtual Items. Retrieved October 22, 2017, from https://www.g2g.com/blog/5-online-games-that-players-invest-heavily-on-virtual-items/
