Live Gamer to Take Over Everquest Exchange

Wade Roush2/11/08

Sony Online Entertainment and New York-based Live Gamer (which we profiled in December) announced last week that Station Exchange, the system Sony launched in 2005 to give citizens of the online game world Everquest a “legal” way to auction off virtual currency, characters, and objects, will be shut down on March 27 and replaced four days later with Live Gamer’s new system for virtual-item trading. Live Gamer, which has venture backing from Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures and Kodiak Venture Partners, works with game publishers to offer sanctioned virtual trading environments designed to prevent fraud and discourage black-market or “off-grid” trading. Sony is one of its first major game-publishing partners.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.