Steam Trading
Saxton Hale’s Possible Influence on the Value of the Dollar
By: CHF [TF 4]
Warning content in this article is that of a personal opinion of a TAW member and may or may not express the thoughts of TAW as a whole.
A new update from Steam featuring inter-game trading is predicted to be influenced by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and possibly influence the market itself. The update allows players to trade items from Team Fortress 2, Spiral Knights, and other gifts bought on Steam, giving players more freedom to barter. Valve hopes to add the massively popular Portal 2 and other third-party games to the mix soon. As usual, Valve has always made promotions to encourage the purchase of other games in order to generate massive revenue. A key example is its coveted Holiday Sale. The Holiday Sale features extremely low prices on tons of games. As I myself have learned, the purchasing process becomes extremely easy and addictive. Once I bought one full game for five dollars I had to get another. An idea that lasted after the Great Depression dawned on me; “you never know when you might need it.” After a few hours I noticed that my debit card got rejected. Being on a Mac, I am restricted on the amount of available games because Apple has not quite dove into the whole gaming world. Regardless of the restriction I had just bought many games.
This idea of connection from game to game is the basis of steam. Steam is a game provider made by Valve, that makes games itself, an ingenious plan of course. They rake in cash whenever a game is popularized that they provide and then they make cash on similar games. Valve has basically piggy backed on the popularity of games time and time again, which have massively popularized their own games in the process.
The virtual world has also had a huge impact on the real world market in the past. A few years ago I did a project on the market in World of Warcraft and the NYSE. Significantly more was bought and sold in WoW on days where the DOW increased by 300 points that day in the market on WoW. Even more interesting was that experienced players seemed to only buy items on days where the market had a steep decline the day before and would sell much more on day where the market peaked. I talked to a few of them and they said they did not follow the NYSE. However, inexperienced players, players with only 1 or two low level characters, bought without a pattern and seemed personally disappointed with their purchase when I interviewed them. The most interesting part of all was the day that was reported to have huge gain by top analysts (who did not play WoW). At the time, I was on the Alliance. So as I was on, there was a severe attack from the Horde that lasted for hours. This severely discouraged buyers at the market because they were getting killed and their focus was drawn away from the market. I quickly jumped to check the stock market and it was declining as the attacks continued. I also happened to record Mad Money the same day, where Mr. Kremer said he literally was so confused that the market dropped that day. Amazed with my findings I tracked down a chart showing the date of attacks and a corresponding DOW 5 year chart. To my amazement , the DOW seemed to drop about 50 points AFTER a severe attack, due to the time it takes for the effect to kick in. I hypothesized that because of the huge amount of people on WoW, there must be some traders online as well, and when they get killed, they get discouraged from buying stocks.
Inside Team Fortress alone, the trading market seems to have waves from time to time but nothing severe. I tried to do my project again on Team Fortress 2 but the small population was probably the reason for the inability to link the NYSE and the in game market. However now that Steam is connecting multiple games and gifts together with limitless possibilities. I attempted to contact Gabe Newell, Co-founder and CEO of Valve, to ask about projections with the real world markey and the inter game market, but he could not speak to me as I have no stance in the journalist world and he was on a flight. I talked to a man of even greater power later though. OnQuack, a deadly spy and Sergeant in the Team Fortress division commented “ [Inter-game trading] is very risky but can be done, and it could increase revenue for the steam community which would bring the programmers money, and the game designers money which everybody likes, but who knows. Its worth the risk, and it could possibly be done.” The wise man quickly escapes after the words left his mouth.
As we all know, Mann Co., the made up company that apparently sells all the equipment to Team Fortress 2 characters, has a catalog, which allows players to quickly buy the items they want for stone cold cash. This puts a real dollar value on items in game. The inter game trading system would indirectly assign dollar value to other game items. This causes an extreme web to form with all games where the decline of one game will bring down all games because the previous perfect bubble of your game could fall if Team Fortress 2 were to fall. This is because the value of your items would systematically drop as the other game drops, causing you to feel less value in the game itself, making you stop playing. One by one the games would plummet without stop. All the time this happens, the dollar value assignment in the Mann Co. Catalog would stay the same, due to stubborn Valve executives. This would basically cause what is known as deflation. The threat of constant inflation would make this seem like it’s a good thing but it is in fact exponentially worse. Deflation is something that can be easily observed by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve purposely inflates the dollar slightly to encourage spending which is quite successful. After they stimulate the market a bit, they deflate the market, knowing that the market can stand on its own feet now, to keep the value of the dollar stable. In the last recession what happened was they deflated the market unknowing that the banks would test the market to grab some quick cash but what happened was the market was too unstable.
The huge population of players in Team Fortress 2 and other games would then see the value of their money drop significantly, not in the NYSE, but the amount of stuff they can get in the catalog. This would seriously discourage spending in the real world, such as ramen noodles and other essentials, causing other spending to drop because of the webbed world of our market, causing a recession. The funny thing is that it works like a butterfly effect. If you decide to pwn a n00b who happens to have a huge amount of cash and wants to buy an item, then you might discourage him from buying, then the feeling will spread and so forth. The reality is that this is so unlikely and that Steam trading will probably be a big hit and will bring trolls together to help them in their art. The grim truth is the big picture is that games affect the world. Games must be played knowing that the 1’s and 0’s can change the greens in your pocket.