Quote of note:

The 34-year-old Kiblinger says he makes more money selling nonexistent merchandise than he did as a chemist at Procter & Gamble, where his research yielded two patents. His six-figure salary àhe declined to be more specific àis enough to support his wife and toddler son and a house in a gated community in Daniels, W.Va.

Virtual Power Brokers
There's real money to be made selling unreal stuff, such as digital weapons and land, to online gamers. It's a controversial market.
By Alex Pham
Times Staff Writer
May 16, 2005

Robert Kiblinger's online shop does brisk business in items fantastic.

For $179.88, there's the Blade of the Righteous, a sword forged specifically to slay demons. The $69.88 Shadow Dancer Leggings allow their wearer to sneak about undetected. And then there's Titan's Hammer, which wreaks $129.88 worth of unmitigated havoc.

All command real money, but none are real.

Like a rapidly growing number of online merchants, Kiblinger traffics in virtual goods that exist only in the realm of Internet-based games such as "Ultima Online," "EverQuest" and "Second Life."

As intricate fantasy games like these grow more popular, they are spawning real-world economies full of digital arms dealers, cyberspace land speculators and virtual currency traders.

About $100 million to $200 million a year changes hands for stuff that exists only as bits of data on the hard drives of far-flung computers, said Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University and author of the upcoming book "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games."

Some enterprising vendors employ dozens of people who do nothing but play online games to collect items for sale.

"When I first went to my accountant, she was flabbergasted that I could sell things that weren't really there," said Kiblinger, whose UOTreasures website gets more than 1 million visits a month. "But for my customers, these items are very real. They love these games, and the items have real value to them."