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Oct 3 / Ozymandias

Gamerscore for Sale? <sigh>

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Saw a post over on Joystiq that's talking about power leveling, or the ability pay someone real money to buff up your Gamerscore. To quote:

For years now, companies have offered to level your Everquest and World of Warcraft characters for a fee. By catering to the whims of players who want that level 60 mount but don't really have the time to obtain it on their own, firms that farm rake it in.

Therefore, 'twas only a matter of time before farmers that specialize in taking the grind out of virtual gruntwork made the leap over to the Xbox 360. A site called "Level My 360" has jumped in (har) and now offers 3,000 XBL gamer points for the low, low price of $300.

The thing that struck me as most interesting about this is that Achievements (and the Gamerscore associated with them) have become a currency… one just as valuable as virtual currency in MMOs, and one some people might be willing to pay real dollars for. I certainly don't condone it, but it does support my belief that competitors will need to have their own Achievements/Gamerscore system in the future as it's definitely a tipping aspect for some folks. (For the record, I now believe the rumor of PS3 "Entitlements" to be false; however, I fully expect a similar solution within the next year or so once the online service has launched.)

For what it's worth, I'm not too worried about this sort of thing damaging the Achievement "market." Since games each decide how/when to give out Achievements, there's plenty of slack in the system to help iron out spikes. On top of that, we're seeing developers getting more and more invested in Achievements and thinking harder about how to give them out. With every passing month we have more and more titles with Achievements and Gamerscore to deepen the ocean. Over time I honestly doubt we'll see this as anything more than noise across the entire system.

Related posts:

  1. Wired Article on Achievements and Gamerscore
  2. [Edit] Sony Sizes Up Xbox Live
  3. Live Anywhere (But Even There?)
  4. Playstation 3 Online to Have "Entitlements"

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  • RomeoDude

    First of all, who would be that desperate for gamerscore to pay the price of a core system for gamerscore??!?!?  I mean, gamerscore is fun to get and to see how your friends are progressing in games and how they compare to you, but this is just ridiculous!

    Second of all, how hard is 3000??  Seariously, you could buy at least 5 sports games that have easy gamerscore for $300!

    But anyways, I totally agree.  Achievements and gamerscore is a great idea, and all systems need to have it, as it sells games, and it makes you want to go back to games that you haven’t played in awhile to get that extra 30 points, or to finally beat that game you gave up on 3 months ago.  Gamerscore adds depth to games, and it is making many advances as the Xbox 360 matures.  The only flaw is that not all games are created equeal.  Some games will give you 10 points for something that you can get 100 for in another game.

  • Porktree

    I’ll call BS on this.  Whereas currency and level have real value ingame for WoW, EQ, and their ilk gamerpoints have no intrinsic value.  And $300 for 3000 points, makes me check the date on my calendar – is it April already ;)

  • 10shu

    I think microsoft should give a real value to the gamerscores…for exemple if your gamerscore is 100000 you can convert it to 100 xboxlive credit so u can buy xbox live game…I know this would seem to push people sell there acount but 100000 credit is hard to get and it didnt worth the buy for 300$…better buy official credits…

    just an ideas…

  • geraldrog

    i was a bit surprised you failed to mention cheating in your whole article. At the present time, the achievements system is losing its value because of cheaters who use other game saves to get all the achievements on a game without even playing it.

    hope this problem get fixed before it devalues the system beyond repair….

  • HcC

    If microsoft gave rewards for people who had a higher gamerscore it would only encourage people to cheat to get to that point.

    Wouldn’t it also be possible to cheat through gamesaves? copying ones with completed acheivements to another console? maybe have to modify it a bit. Either way, if people want to spend 300 dollars to get a certain gamerscore who cares. The whole point of getting the high number is the process involved, not the end result. Plus they would have to live with themselves knowing that they will never have sex.

  • http://s15.invisionfree.com/Game_Over/index.php Balor

    Isn’t this a security liability?  And shouldn’t Microsoft close it down?  People are stupid enough to forfeit their password to their Live accounts, but too quick to forget that in some cases credit card details are attached to their live account as well as whatever other personal material is in their hotmail accounts.

  • 35000+ Xbox 360 geek

    300 bucks for some chump to spend about an hour total with NBA 2K6, MLB 2K6, and NHL 2K6. I’ll do it for $250!

  • .NETian

    I’ve always wondered who will be the first to try to sell their GamerTag. Wonder who will be the first to sell a 30,000 point GamerTag, and how much the bidding for that will go for?

  • Solidmercury

    I think it’s hilarious that we all fall under the spell of gamerscores and such (myself included).  The majority of my friends with higher scores are not better gamers, but the ones who buy a lot of games.  I personally only have the score I do because I rent games occassionally.

    It’s really never made sense to me as a gauge of one’s ability, except in the few games with nigh impossible achievements, even though we look at it that way.  And now this kind of story strips away any of the ability to look at it and see that someone else has played game "A".  No, they payed someone else to play it.  Instead of my score saying "look how many games I play," it’s saying nothing.

  • http://www.slashcry.com dozens

    Not surprised here.  The minute you have anything that gives a ranking it will push gamers to try to move up, in general.  It’s almost a game in intself.  

    I always considered this a brilliant marketing strategy that MS employed to enourage sales of games (Arcade and disks), paying for Live, and to point at something else that competitors lack (encouraging console sales).  

    You’ll be hard pressed to find something negative about an addition that on the surface seems "just for fun" to "add to the game experience", but this does smell of some nice physocological research, especialyl since the target audience is full of gamers (implied competitiveness).

    I like achievments in general, as they can help give replay value and goals to otherwise very linear and boring games.  This especially helps open-ended games that are fairly easy to compelte story-wise (Saints Row being a good example).  But I never saw it as anything other than a smart marketing move.

  • Anonymous

    Re: "i was a bit surprised you failed to mention cheating in your whole article. At the present time, the achievements system is losing its value because of cheaters who use other game saves to get all the achievements on a game without even playing it.

    hope this problem get fixed before it devalues the system beyond repair…."

    Don’t worry. One of the nice things about a managed service is that you can address this sort of thing. Can’t share details, but it’s not being ignored. Soon…

  • http://dev.teamxlink.org MeanMF

    Some publishers apparently condone cheating..In GRAW for example you can get all of the single player achievements with the built-in God mode cheat turned on.  Sigh.

  • http://www.myspace.com/xgatecrasherx X GATECRASHER X

    Wow, my gamerscore is worth more that my Xbox!

  • geraldrog

    just read the actual web site advert and it seems they will use the same method as gamesavers..

    This is quoted from the web page :

    "After completing payment, one of our leveling professionals will contact you via email to obtain the necessary information to temporarily access and level your account."

  • HcC

    "Some publishers apparently condone cheating..In GRAW for example you can get all of the single player achievements with the built-in God mode cheat turned on.  Sigh."

    I’ve been playing enchanted arms and I got to the end and realized that my characters are about 3,000 hp too weak to win. There’s this cheat where you go to the casino, bet 20,000 chips in roullette for more chips, trade chips for items, then sell the items for the used currency. I’ve avoided doing it, but I can’t finish the game without walking around for another few days getting into random fights. I’m beginning to think the developers want me to cheat.

  • J.Goodwin

    Many game saves are locked to your profile.  If they were copied to another person’s account, then they would be recognized as "corrupted" and the software would generally delete them.

  • geraldrog

    "Many game saves are locked to your profile.  If they were copied to another person’s account, then they would be recognized as "corrupted" and the software would generally delete them."

    ok, guess the key word here is "many" and not "all"? does this mean that if all games were locked to the profile it would be impossible to copy them..?

  • http://www.xbox360achievements.org/ PaleGringo

    Funny that .NETian and others should mention selling Gamercards… turns out that the current world leader, RANCE6 is doing just that.

    http://cgi.ebay.com/XBOX360-HARDDRIVE-with-GAMERTAG-1st-IN-THE-WOLRD-XBLA_W0QQitemZ220035230072QQihZ012QQcategoryZ41018QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

    Now I’m not saying that it’s wrong to do this kind of thing, per se, just *pointless.*

    I’m creeping up on about 28K for GS right now, but am in no way thinking about selling it off to make a quick buck (or several thousands, as the case goes).  Personally, I think that the whole concept of achievements is pretty dang spiffy.  They can be like milestones in a game, and let you know how far you’re progressing to certain goals – as a benchmark for you or your friends.

    But what value is there if you cheat, or pay somebody else to get there for you?

    I’m not a wealthy man, by any means, but I enjoy gaming where I can and find rental services to have amazing value for the cost.  I’d be interested in seeing how some company like LevelMy360 (which is a technical misnomer, since the hardware can’t be "leveled" anyhow) intends to get 3000 points added on to 28,000… or in exrtreme cases, 81,000.  

    Here’s to hoping that Ozy and the 360 Dev Crew can curtail this trend and keep gaming the way its supposed to be – fun, for every player.

  • .NETian

    And that URL is now down, appears someone didn’t like the listing? Or maybe it was taken down by someone else, or someone else posing to be "the top gamerscore person" hehe…

  • http://www.xbox360achievements.org/ PaleGringo

    Apologies on the broken link.  It was working when I posted it, and indeed, has been removed from eBay, likely after the spurious bids that were being retracted.

    Here’s a link to the original article:

    http://www.360monster.com/newspost.php?id=0000001306

    Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.