美国的现金交易市场引起了许多人的关注。 韩国媒体《JoongAng Daily》刊登了一篇由Jung Ha-won发表的文章，文章描述了当前韩国现金交易市场发展的态势。 Itembay.com是韩国最大的虚拟物品交易商。 虚拟物品的价格目前已经达到了非常高的水平――NHN 的《R2》的一套武器装备最近卖了1250万韩元（折合人民币将近10万元），如文章所述，其价格比一辆汽车还高。

确实，天价装备的出现是源于韩国游戏在设计上的考量――也就是通过控制出现频率,使得每100或者10,000玩家中只有一套这样的装备。游戏系统如果真正是按这种方式来设计，就会出现前面所说的天价装备。在这方面，美国与韩国有很大的区别，在美国的游戏中，只要你有时间，可以反复地打出多件这样的装备出来，似乎不受游戏人数的约束。 对开发人员来说，按韩国的方式来设计游戏对促进鼓励游戏第二市场的发展是非常重要的。

在韩国，稀有装备价格的高低也部分地反映了游戏的规模大小和游戏的流行程度，这是无庸置疑的。毕竟，游戏规模越大，稀有装备在玩家中的地位就越高。

根据韩国游戏产业开发院统计，2006年，整个韩国现金交易市场规模是1兆韩元（超过了10亿美元）。 Itembay 拥有300万注册用户，2006年销售额达160亿韩元（1700万美元）。

原文如下：

Inside Korea’s Billion Dollar RMT Market

The US Real Money Transaction Market (RMT) gets a lot of attention. JoongAng Daily has an excellent article by Jung Ha-won on the current state of the Korean RMT world. Itembay.com is the major auction house for virtual items. Items have reached very high prices - a set of swords and armor for NHN’s R2 game were recently sold for 12.5 Million Won (well over US$13,000) - a price, the article notes, that is higher than a used car.

This is certainly a function of the design of rare items in Korean games - where they are allocated at a rate of one per 1000 or 10,000 players - a system that, if actually implemented in this manner, may be very different from that seen in US games where rare items can be “forced” by repetitive play and do not seem to be capped based on the population of the game. This would be an important design element for a developer seeking to encourage a secondary market.

The high prices of rare items in Korea are, no doubt, partially a reflection of the size of the games and gaming population. After all, bigger games can support more interesting scarcity limitations.

The total Korean RMT market was projected at 1 Trillion Won (over US$1 Billion) in 2006, according to the Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute. Itembay has 3 million subscribers and had total sales of 16 Billion Won (US$17 Million) in 2006.