What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-broke-the-magic-online-economy/

by minimaxir • 11 years ago

76 39 11 years ago

brandnewlow3• 11 years ago

I've played online now and then for about 10 years. For me, the biggest difference was the addition of phantom events. Unlike normal online tournements, where you have to buy some packs to paticipate, with phantom events you just pay a price. In return you don't get to keep the cards you play with.

For people just looking to play, not to compete or build a collection, phantom events make way more sense. I have to imagine their popularity has also depressed the secondary value of packs.

thom• 11 years ago

Yeah, if they just had a flat monthly fee for infinite phantom drafts, I would love that. Although having played on beta servers, infinite would probably be the wrong number as everyone just drops at the first sign of trouble.

lacker• 11 years ago

Maybe infinite drafts + some ELO that people care about. Or Hearthstone style where you don't have to face the opponents you just drafted against.

wlesieutre• 11 years ago

If there's a monthly fee, they can just penalize players who disconnect. The usual barrier to that is free games where if you penalize/ban somebody they'll just come back with a new account.

Vraxx• 11 years ago

I've actually taken the opportunity while the economy is "broken" to get into the online game versus the paper game. I've quite enjoyed being able to draft for about half the price it is on paper in order to get practice, as well as build a smallish online collection. Seemed like the perfect time to jump into the economy.

CurtHagenlocher• 11 years ago

"Again, I have no data to back this up, just a sense of this trend."

danielvinson• 11 years ago

That statement just doesn't fit well with what is being said - what the author meant was something more like "my hypothesis is that constructed popularity goes down over time but since Wizards doesn't release data on this we cannot know for sure". This really should have been caught by the editor (cough Andy... cough) and clarified.

dogecoinbase• 11 years ago

Yes, this is how a hypothesis is formed.

brandnewlow3• 11 years ago

For those interested in analysis with some actual data of the MTGO world, this site has a few folks who follow it rabidly: http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-june-12th-2015

gohrt• 11 years ago

Why do players think it's acceptable to have an "economy" for trading virtual gamepieces? Why don't they walk away and play game/culture that charges a flat fee or a time/usage-based subscription?

imancit• 11 years ago

In short, because Magic is one of the best games ever designed, and this is the only sanctioned way to play the full game online. Magic online was created a long, long time ago before more modern concepts of game monetization (freemium / mtx based) were developed. It's ended up as something more akin to an online poker room than a gaming server.

brandnewlow3• 11 years ago

I get why people think it's silly and so forth, but I can't agree more with "one of the best games ever designed." Richard Garfield gave the world something really tremendous with MtG

Naga• 11 years ago

I've tried other games that are similar to Magic, such as Hearthstone, but I always go back to Magic because there is nothing like it.

dublinben• 11 years ago

MTG, like many other collectible card games, is as much about the "economy" and the collecting aspect, as it is about actually 'playing' the game. This has unsurprisingly carried onto the official online version as well.

Those who don't want to pay, have always been able to play for free with GccG and others.

jerf• 11 years ago

Pretty much all that is necessary for an "economy" to develop is some form of scarcity, the ability to trade reasonably freely, and the ability of the traders to set prices. If you've got that, you'll get a market of one sort or another, and it's not hard to even accidentally end up meeting one of the conditions when you didn't mean to. Charging flat fees or usage-based subscription fees is not enough to guarantee that an economy will still not emerge... MMORPGs have those things and economies, too.

(There's not much guarantee about what sort of economy you'll get... it's easy to get one that pathological in some sense, either psychological or mathematical. But you'll get something.)

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

Basically, because Wizards of the Coast came up with the core concepts of the pay-to-win money treadmill game 15 years before the App Store launched--low cost to start playing, psychological impetus to spend more money on a regular basis, appealing to kids and teens with lots of free time and a willingness to badger their parents for money, social enough that players will stay in the game for years because all their friends play. It's kind of breathtaking when you look at the parallels now.

They had that entire previously-untapped goldmine of a market space to themselves (or near enough, given the quality of their early competition) for long enough to get really culturally entrenched, and that meant they were able to shift the model online (and keep a much greater chunk of the profits) without as much resistance as you might expect--if you already believe that 5 cents' worth of ink and cardboard can be worth dozens or hundreds of dollars if it's got the right picture on it, it's a lot easier to believe that the same picture on your computer screen can be worth the same.

alasdair_2• 11 years ago

pay-to-win money treadmill game

Money isn't really an object at any kind of serious tournament - everyone has/ can borrow all the cards they need to play.

hansjorg2• 11 years ago

Planet Money on NPR did a piece recently on how WotC avoided some of these issues and made the card game such a success twenty plus years ago.

There's also some interesting anecdotes regarding the Hasbro buy out.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...

cdr3• 11 years ago

That was not well researched though, if at all - it's by complete outsiders with little actual knowledge of what happened. Even the person they talk to (Skaff Elias IIRC) gives them a dubious offhand anecdote. It's a Malcolm Gladwell level story.

hansjorg2• 11 years ago

The stories about the Hasbro buyout I was thinking of were actually from Peter Adkison's blog, read that just after hearing the NPR piece and got them mixed up:

http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas...

nosuchthing2• 11 years ago

The whole concept of collectable cards feels like a scam, right alongside the freemium pay-for-virtual-clothing hustle.

carapace• 11 years ago

When all my friends got into MtG back in high school I said, "I'll play but I'm going to make my own cards. I don't want to buy them from the store." But no one would go for it. I never understood. I used to say, "But there are no actual wizards at Wizards of the Coast."

Sone7• 11 years ago

cough cockatrice

thaumasiotes• 11 years ago

I know someone who prints out color images of the cards he wants to play with and sticks them into sleeves as inserts. It works fine.

It's even easier and cheaper to insert a little strip of paper with a card name on it, though then you need to be familiar with what all the cards do.

spiritplumber• 11 years ago

Yeah, that was a thing for us too circa 1996. It ended with there being two groups of players: "Poor" players that printed cards and had access to the entire card catalog and could build insane cheese, and "rich" players who didn't and didn't.

Then there were the my-dad-owns-a-textile-mill types who would learn a cheese from the print-it-yourselfers, spend millions of lire on cards, and replicate the cheese with the people who played with the official cards.

cdr3• 11 years ago

You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment.

Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resale value. You can technically sell game accounts I suppose, but it's inevitably against Terms of Service and commensurately difficult.

r721• 11 years ago

Did you see this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/37tqqa/how_sellin... ?

nosuchthing2• 11 years ago

Artificial scarcity is the scam. You have pieces of mass produced paper with ink.

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

I feel like there's a great MtGox joke to be made here, but it's not coming to me.

alasdair_2• 11 years ago

The main reason the MTGO economy is broken is simple: MTGO is incredibly shoddily designed and coded. It crashes all the time and has so many memory leaks they still plague users ten years after it was built.

All of the issues lead to a LOT of refunds, essentially doubling the product (tickets and cards) in circulation.

Recently, the game moved over to "4.0" which was even worse than 3.0 which has, in part, exacerbated the problem.

This actually has a knock on effect on the paper magic markets where card redemption (can turn digital cards into paper cards) has a big impact on prices. There are countless articles on MTGPrice.com about this.

soup10• 11 years ago

Hearthstone.

jvdh• 11 years ago

The article is using 'fancy' graphs, economic 101 and a long analysis to hide the fact that he is basing most of his theory on gut feeling. There are several points at which he states this himself, but fails to mention that these become crucial to the whole analysis.

What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

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