Paying Real Taxes for Virtual Items?
by Elizabeth Harper 
Mar 28th 2006 at 3:00PM
All you have to do is visit eBay to see that your virtual acquisitions in Azeroth have real money value. But
if my epic-geared character has a real value (a priest in my guild was recently offered $1000 for his character), does
that make it a taxable
asset? The IRS has no definitive answer for this, though as the market for buying and selling virtual goods
becomes larger, there's the chance that this could change. While such real life consequences for a game might
seem far-fetched, they're already starting to occur - players in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual
property and Chinese courts have ordered game companies to restore stolen (virtual) goods. Can the IRS be far behind?Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Economy
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Physical Original Mar 28th 2006 4:28PM
This is a fallacy for WoW until Blizzard changes it EULA. If you look you will discover that you don't own your account, your character, your items, in short anything you do with the game. WoW characters/accounts/items cannot be legally sold and have no value.
EQ2 is a different story however....