Comment by saghm

OTOH even as someone who played a popular online Blizzard game for years (and realistically spent a decent amount of money on it), maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if this sort of think becomes considered more "scam" than "legitimate business model". There's almost never a direct 1:1 ratio between the real money you convert into the currency and the price of the thing you want to get (which isn't that surprising, as it would probably be pointless to ask someone to put in $20 to convert to widgets only to immediately ask for all of their widgets for the item they want rather than ask for the $20 directly), which means you either buy more than you intended or hold onto it in the hopes that you can put it towards something else you want later. What percentage of people who have ever bought one of these currencies do you think don't currently still hold some due to having leftover from their most recent purchase? What percentage of people have bought some and later stopped playing the game managed to spend all of them before they stopped? All of those people have basically been taken advantage of IMO (probably knowingly, but that's hardly an excuse when there's a power imbalance). Even if the relative injustice is small compared to other things in the world, it would still probably be better for business models like that not to exist.

(edit: in retrospect "OTOH" was a poor choice of words since this isn't really a different point than the parent comment is making)