Game money as one of the main game tools was present in computer and console games of the 1980s.
From there, they migrated to the 1990s and at the very beginning of the zero years of our century in the online version of these games.
And the number of new games based on the accumulation and spending of virtual goods (commodity money) or in-game currency grew rapidly, the popularity of such games was off the charts.
There is no point in looking for which online currency was the first. There were many of them, a rare fantasy world, even inhabited by dragons and other monsters, did without trade and money relations.
Many such currencies have sunk without a trace into the past, others, for example, rupees from Legend of Zelda, simoleons from Sims, coins from Ultima (every gamer with experience can continue this series to his taste), on the contrary, due to the global popularity of games with them not only became legends themselves, but also influenced the economy of the entire gaming industry.
In 2000, Professor of Economics at California State University Edward Castronova estimated the "gross gross national product" of the EverQuest virtual world at $135 million.
The professor was prompted to make such an assessment by the fact that:
"gamers who have accumulated virtual, intangible wealth, such as magic weapons in EverQuest, sell surplus on eBay for non-screen currency".
The rest was, as they say, a matter of technique: using the exchange value of virtual goods determined by eBay, he calculated the gross product of the virtual world inhabited by avatars in the form of people, elves, gnomes, trolls, dragons, etc.
But in reality, in 2003 on eBay, goods created in Internet games were sold for about $9 million, in 2004 for three times the amount. Sales growth was exponential.
However, having estimated the volume of exchange of virtual game currency on its first electronic "exchanges", for real, or rather "full-fledged" (as it is now positioned) electronic money, in several hundred million and, having understood the meagerness of their turnover compared to the world financial market, the economists of the zero years of our century have lost interest in the fate of online game currencies, giving their fate into the hands of MMORPG manufacturers.
Economists then were much more concerned about another problem - cryptocurrencies, which became a real headache for them.
Only now economists have again taken care of gaming money, or rather taxes on trading in-game currencies and items, which have become a real commodity with a global market volume, according to 2022 data of $4 billion. They say their sales are tax-free and can be used for money laundering and terrorist financing.
From the very beginning, the gamers were extremely outraged by the open trade of the values of their virtual worlds, which were obtained with such hard work and enthusiasm.
They believed that "the game should remain a game, otherwise everything comes down to an alternative to gambling with the emptying of the majority wallets and the enrichment of units both in the game and in real life".
But someone was trading these values. It was easy to guess who exactly. They didn't even hide, but on the contrary, they advertised themselves.
Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest online game was released in 1999 in America, and in 2000 in Europe, and in 2001 two ardent gamers of this game, Brock Pierce and Alan Debonneville founded Internet Gaming Entertainment Ltd (IGE) and opened an online store in Hong Kong, where their Chinese team, which they hired, supplied avatars and virtual values for this game in the assortment.
As the IGE management explained, "gamers can play games all day and earn some money on it. They will sell us additional armor and pay for a subscription to the game."
Sony Online Entertainment has strongly stated that "selling characters, items or equipment in Everquest would contradict the end user license agreement", and it does not support trading, as it causes "more problems with customer service and game balancing than probably anything else that happens in the game".
And having said this, she immediately opened her own exchange Station Exchange to attract gaming money from eBay.In 2005, in a survey of gamers on the EverQuest II trading site, 47.76% of respondents agreed that trading on the side of in-game values is "a betrayal of every real player".
But the others agreed with the famous English proverb "If you can't defeat them, join them".
In its original form, in antiquity, this maxim sounded like this: "If you are in Rome, behave like a Roman."
or,
"To live with wolves is to howl like a wolf."
All the quotes taken above (except for the last one about wolves) are from scientific publications on virtual game currency and from gaming forums.
However, experienced gamers already know all this. For at least twenty years they have been haunted by advertising appeals of something like this:
Buy virtual currency for online games at a wholesale price. Are you worried about authenticity? Don't worry! We employ the best and most reliable specialists.
No matter how tangible the line between play and work (pretence and reality) is, in the currency market of computer games, this line is erased without any entertainment purpose, and players again find themselves in the real world, worrying about exchange rates between game currencies and the US dollar.
Manufacturers of MMORPG, in turn, realizing that where toy money is used as a game tool, saturation of the virtual market with a large amount of money from the outside would lead to the most real hyperinflation and thereby undermine the very essence of the game, but unable to stop the activities of the "exchanges" of game currency, sanely decided to lead this process.
They have directors (managers) for game monetization in the staff, we also have enough such specialists in our country now. At the same time, the profession of a gameologist appeared in science, and within its framework a gameologist-economist.
The same professor of economics Edward Castronova became a professor of telecommunications and cognitive sciences.
By the way, in 2018 he created the game American Abyss about the second Civil War with the United States, which broke out in 2040.
The game had its own game currency, but it was desktop, the professor of cognitive sciences for some reason was wary of its online version.
Gamologists have laid out virtual online currencies: hard, soft, internal, etc., only 11 varieties, that is, twice as many as the main types of modern real money. Warnings to parents of children playing online games with virtual money began to be published more and more often.
Perhaps the most touching such warning appeared in November 2020 on the financial educational platform Rooster Money of the British holding company NatWest Group:
"Where there is money, there are people ready to help you break up with it, so talk to your children about how to identify fraudsters and protect yourself from those who want to take away their valuables from innocent young players by deception."
In short, game money has long hatched from the cocoon of Milton Bradley cardboard coins and Charles Darrow's toy dollar bills, leaned and live their own life. There are many games with money from aggressive risky extraction of them (or their commodity equivalent) rather by looting than trade, with purchases for this weapon for real money, to bucolic games with harvesting crops of turnips, tomatoes and fishing in a pond, their sale on the in-game market for in-game money, which neither scammers nor game monetization managers will not come to mind and which are spent by players without problems and hassle on expanding their virtual farm.
After all these stories, should we be surprised that we played with virtual money independent of the state regulator with such excitement for a century and a half that we eventually invented cryptocurrency?
