Delisted

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I may have mentioned it in passing, but there have been so many other interesting things happening in the industry that I never thanked EBay for delisting all auctions for virtual property.

This move won't stop or slow down the runaway freight train that is the real money trading industry. It will just transfer the sales to the independent gold farmers. It does show that EBay doesn't trust the sellers and that they aren't comfortable that they in fact own what they are selling.

"Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained that the decision to pull these items was due to the 'legal complexities' surrounding virtual property. "For the overall health of the marketplace" the company felt that the proper course of action, after considerable contemplation, was to ban the sale of these items outright."

In effect, EBay is stating that the virtual property belongs to the developer/publisher of the game and not to the player, which is the same thing that most of the developers have been saying all along in their EULAs.

While visiting Scott Jennings' blog I came across a link to a story about our favourite gold farming company. At the end of the story in the comments was the following quote, anonymous and impossible for me to verify, it still put a smile on my face.

"ige is not profitable. they bought the korean rmt platforms with investment money they got from goldman sachs. but now gs wants its money back because they discovered that ige did not fully disclose financials. ige is in the process of trying to sell allakhazam and thottbot to raise the money to pay them back. they are closing the office in california and relocating everything to china so they can't be sued. another thing i heard is that they are hiring a new ceo and cfo and plan to offshore all their money and assets to china until they can sell what is left of the business in the usa. also that the guys running the company are trying to hide money from the investment that they got in swiss bank accounts and trying to change the name of the company. a lot of people have lost their jobs there in the last few weeks and they think there is something big going to happen in january or february because they closed the california office and told everyone there is no forwarding address."

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