Is the RSGP market saturated?

If you take a look here, http://www.sythe.org/runescape-3-gold-sales/ there is about 20 'big name' gold sellers. Now obviously these gold sellers aren't farming the gold themselves, they're simply flipping it for a small profit.

This poses the question of whether there are far too many people competing in this market as RS is gradually declining in it's player base. Can there really be that many players who are still buying gold?

What path do you think the gold buying/selling scene will take? Do you think gold websites will place dominance over forum selling?

I would be interested to your your opinions.

 

If there is profit to be made, people will continue to join the market until it becomes unprofitable for them to do so. This is your point of "market saturation" (break-even point in some models). People always phase out; the larger goldsellers will remain while the smaller ones will slowly become less profitable until they leave the market assuming the market keeps getting smaller. I feel like it's a lot of the same people buying gold over and over again these days, so I'm not sure that the above will necessarily be the case. I don't see how website and forum selling are that different since they're not competing directly.

 

Hey Anthony,

I'd be happy to give you some insights into the RSGP market.

On PlayerAuctions both RS2007 & RS3 have been experiencing slow, but steady increases in order volume over the past 3 months. Most of this is due to an improvement in some of our funneling activities in bringing people to the site. Overall PlayerAuctions has had about a 30% compound aggregated growth rate (CAGR) every year since 2008.

To answer your question, I do not think that b2c websites will take precedence over traditional player to player trading. From what I have know from several competing websites, their general average transaction volume has actually been decreasing. And not just for RS.

RMT & secondary market trading are becoming less taboo. It is common place now to make purchases in-game given the mobile trends, as well as with Blizzard launching the RMAH, and a multitude of other games having switched to f2p (Turbine & Bioware) or RMT pro-models (Trion & CCP).

What is going to happen, are people are going to make a shift to consumer to consumer platforms. I actually have big plans next year to work closely together with trading forums like Sythe to make this a reality.

Cheers,
jacob

 

Yeah there are obviously a lot of people in the market for gold trading, otherwise it wouldnt have so many sellers here on sythe.

RWT has been booming since free trade bro, everyone does it. From stakers, to people who want a little edge in their skilling, RWT has always been a "safe" way to gain virtual advantages, if you know what you're doing.

 

PA has done quite a bit for the gold selling community because you don't need any reputation to sell, really. As long as your prices are the lowest + 20 min delivery, you always get sales. The other thing it does well is the protection. I guess we have to receive something for those crazy fees !