It seems wired has devoted some 6,000+ words to a character piece on Brock Pierce.
The Decline & Fall of an Ultra Rich Gaming Empire
For those of you who don't know Brock he is the founder of IGE. The article is written in a sort of New Yorker fashion and is an interesting read if you haven't been following this stuff for the past decade. Here are the highlights that weren't previously "on the record" before this article:
- "Yantis declined to participate in this article, but he spoke with me at length in 2002 about his business. He was netting roughly $2,500 a day—nearly $1 million in annual profit from an operation consisting of himself and an assistant working out of his house in Rosarito, Mexico. He also had maybe a dozen in-game delivery agents in places like Romania, working for the equivalent of $3.50 per delivery. They were the virtual-world equivalent of couriers, walking their avatars right up to the purchaser's avatar to hand over the in-game goods."
- "January 22, 2004: IGE and Yantis' MySuperSales site were merging. Yantis got payments totalling $2.4 million and a 37 percent stake in the new company, and he joined the team as chief operating officer. "After that, the money started to flow," Pierce says. "Very well.
Note: Initial reports were that Yantis got $10 million and stock, that's one of the first official numbers I've seen.
- Speaking of gold farmers: "They worked 84-hour weeks, got a couple of days off per month, and earned about $4 a day, which even for China was not a stellar wage."
- "Goldman Sachs started making visits, inspecting the Asian operations and talking with Bannon and others about terms. Finally, on February 7, 2006, the deal was inked: Goldman Sachs, together with a consortium of private funds, made a reported $60 million investment in the company. Part of the money was used to buy Pierce, Salyer, and IGE's general counsel, Randy Maslow, out of some of their stock in the company. Pierce walked away with $20 million and still retained the controlling share of a company that was doing more than a quarter of a billion dollars in sales a year."
On a side note I've always loved Jullian Dibbell's initial impression of Brock: "Brock Pierce looks like a Norman Rockwell 13-year-old, talks like a coked-up 35-year-old, and happens to have turned 23 last Friday. He is either my new best friend or my new worst nightmare."
The best lines from the article however are:
"Debonneville was told at first by Pierce's Spanish lawyers that his partner had gone on vacation to Thailand. In fact, Pierce was in government custody. According to Debonneville's initial complaint, which was later sealed by the court in the course of a business-related suit, Pierce later told him that a Spanish SWAT team had moved in on the house of the former DEN execs with guns and helicopters. Pierce and Shackley spent a month in detention before being released, but Collins-Rector remained in the Spanish prison system for another year and a half, fighting extradition to the US on criminal charges of transporting a minor across state lines with intent to engage in sexual activity. Debonneville claims Pierce spent much of that time trying to help Collins-Rector—at one point even flying to Africa to try to buy his former boss a Liberian diplomatic title and whatever immunity might go with it."
These are the sort of people who gained control of the RMT industry. This is exactly the sort of behavior this site is trying to get rid of in the RMT industry through the distribution of information and accountability.