No Silk Road for Online Gamers!: Using Social Network Analysis to Unveil Black Markets in Online Games

TL;DR

This paper uses social network analysis on in-game transaction data to detect and characterize real money trading (RMT) markets in online games, revealing their structure, size, and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify RMT transactions through social graph analysis and uncovers the market’s structure and growth over time.

Findings

Estimated the size of the RMT market.

Identified network patterns of professional RMT providers.

Observed market evolution into a monopolized structure.

Abstract

Online game involves a very large number of users who are interconnected and interact with each other via the Internet. We studied the characteristics of exchanging virtual goods with real money through processes called "real money trading (RMT)." This exchange might influence online game user behaviors and cause damage to the reputation of game companies. We examined in-game transactions to reveal RMT by constructing a social graph of virtual goods exchanges in an online game and identifying network communities of users. We analyzed approximately 6,000,000 transactions in a popular online game and inferred RMT transactions by comparing the RMT transactions crawled from an out-game market. Our findings are summarized as follows: (1) the size of the RMT market could be approximately estimated; (2) professional RMT providers typically form a specific network structure (either star-shape or chain) in the trading network, which can be used as a clue for tracing RMT transactions; and (3) the observed RMT market has evolved over time into a monopolized market with a small number of large-sized virtual goods providers.