Comment by bdr
4 years ago
Slightly OT, but for the historical record:
> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.
Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. Lazy research in this article.
That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but rather "at least as far back as ....".
The author's correct in their wording, and the point was simply that getting real money out of games in some way is not novel to this new "play to earn" genre.
The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time on historical background.
To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such, actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be something the audience is familiar with, or at least can google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known historical example is less lazy writing than finding the oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not necessarily the oldest").