Real Economist Joins Valve as Virtual Goods Economist

My good friend Andrew Leonard of Salon has a fun and fascinating post about Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist who went from analyzing his country's political system in relation to the EU's struggles to solve the continent's debt crisis... to becoming the official virtual goods economist for Valve Software:

Via the common distribution platform of Steam, Valve players can trade in game items known as “hats” — used to differentiate player avatars from each other — for objects in other games, or even for downloaded games that have been purchased but not yet played. But it’s not always clear how to value items from different games, or what would happen if, say, Team Fortress hat-makers flood the market with an overabundance of supply. You have to be careful when you integrate different economies — as has been demonstrated by the unhappy marriage of Germany and Greece: two vastly different economies attempting to coexist under one currency.

Much more here, and also on the Valve blog. One salient point from Andrew on why Varoufakis is going Valve:

"His recent affiliation with the left-wing political party Syriza and his strong condemnations of Greek neo-Nazis have led to death threats..." In other words, his real world economic theories have led to real terrorist threats, so he's leaving the analyze an economy largely based on the activity of virtual terrorists (and counter-terrorists).

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Comments

[Dave Bell]

It's a good thing that we're seeing economists taking virtual worlds seriously, but, for any problem, finding the one with the right answers can be tricky.

There seem to be fashions in such things, and of course the Emperor's New Clothes were in the highest fashion.

[Voyance pure]

I really love what you do, congratulations! Thank you very much for sharing with us this article.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

EVE Online had an in-house economist for years. Consequently, it's got one of the best economic systems of any MMO.

Virtual goods is a growth sector insofar as you can peddle pleasing permutations of pixels to a populace that's proud to pay plenty for pretend playthings.