Hyperinflation in Gaia Online

Overview

Hyperinflation in Gaia Online began in August 2013 after the release of items known as "gold generators" several months after Gary Schofield became CEO of Gaia Interactive, the company that runs Gaia.

Background

Gaia Online is an anime-themed social networking, gaming and discussion forum site. Members of the site’s community are known as Gaians and each is represented on the site by an avatar that can be customized with different skin tones, facial characteristics, hair style, gender, race and clothing. Through their avatars, members can interact with each others in Gaia Towns, Rally, and other Flash spaces, some of which have been created for paid sponsors. The site contains a variety of different subforums, including boards for general discussion, news, lifestyle, role-playing, entertainment, games and art.

Users receive “Gaia Gold” that can be used to purchase items on the site by posting and replying on the message boards, browsing the site, and playing games. “Gaia Cash” is a virtual currency introduced in 2007 that can be purchased for $0.01 each. Users can buy items with both gold and cash at virtual shops on the site and can trade among each other in a virtual marketplace.

Prior state of Gaia Online's virtual economy

For much of the time, Gaia Online's virtual economy remained stable due to the efforts of previous managements. Craig "fin" Sherman, Gaia Interactive's CEO from 2007-10, said that "up to 99 percent of the experience online is free at Gaia."^[1] At the 2007 Virtual Goods Summit, he continues to emphasize that everyone starts out fair^[2].

In August 2007, due to growing concerns over inflation in the virtual economy^[3], Gaia hired economist Michael Boskin and Stanford University graduate student Saar "Sagger-AT3" Golde to help on managing the economy^[4] (which, at that time, Boskin has judged as healthy^[5]). Golde introduced a 2% tax on all marketplace transactions^[6] and stopped inflation from going out of control twice during his tenure^[7]. David Jesse, Gaia's former Vice President on Product Management & Business Analytics revealed in his presentation for the 2009 Virtual Goods Summit (one of the slides shown above) some of the methods they used to manage inflation^[8] and argued against the direct sale of engagement currencies like Gaia Gold. Mike "muumuupie" Sego, the succeeding CEO, was also concerned about inflation, as he was among the speakers at the 2010 Engage Expo on the topic of managing virtual economies and avoiding currency devaluation^[9].

Gaia Online's economic stability encouraged users to save up gold for the items they want. For instance, Gaia user Catherine "M o l d yLunchboxx" Wayne sought to have an Emo Bag (one of the site's monthly collectible items), which was worth 350,000 Gaia Gold in January 2008^[10]. And in her first video, she said that she considers herself poor for never having 100,000^[11]. Over the years, the price of said item fluctuated within manageable levels^[12].

Early gold generators

Gaia Online had sold gold generators (items that gives its purchasers randomly-generated amounts of gold) several years earlier, beginning on April 29, 2008 with the gold generator named "Bag of Win"^[13]. Gaia staff member Tim "Panagrammic" Lopez admitted in a journal entry that selling the Bag of Win indefinitely would hurt the economy^[14], and Golde revealed that he initially disliked the Bag of Win but approved the sale of said item as an experiment^[15]. Two more gold generators were released in 2008: "Bag of Win 2" (July 30)^[16] and "Gold Gold Revolution Wheel" (December 24)^[17]. For the next four years, Gaia didn't sell additional gold generators.

Schofield's early days in Gaia

In March 2013, faced with a declining userbase, Gaia Online's investor team appointed Gary "B-Skie" Schofield as its new CEO^[18] in an attempt to recoup their investment^[19]. One of the first things Schofield did is to terminate several staff members^[20], among them Lopez^[21], who closely worked with Golde on maintaining the virtual economy. Josh "KirbyUFO" Barnett, one of the terminated staff members, revealed at an entry in his blog that he received "a daunting all-caps e-mail" from Schofield about the impending layoffs, which he described as "heavy-handed".^[22]

On June 18, Gaia's staff confirmed that they're working on an 18+ sister site^[23], reneging on a promise to divert resources from offsite projects to the site itself^[24]. And days later, Gaia Online began the Summer Sale^[25], where the Angelic Halo, the site's first collectible item, was sold at the equivalent price of $999^[26] despite statements against sale of past collectibles several years ago^[27].

By July, anonymously-written reviews of Gaia Interactive from Glassdoor.com were posted in the forums for the first time^[28], and the users became aware of the discontent among Gaia's current and former employees. And on August 15, Josh "L0cke" Gainsbrugh, one of the site's founders, announced his departure through his journal, citing that "Gaia has a new direction" and that he "will not be included in that adventure"^[29].

On September 3, site producer Martial "Narumi Misuhara" Tipsey posted in a journal entry that "all projects going forward must earn their production cost"^[30].

Notable developments

First release of Flynn's Booty

On August 22, 2013, Gaia released a gold generator named "Flynn's Booty"^[31]. In the accompanying FAQ, the staff said that "it is not predicted to have any long-term negative effect on the economy"^[32]. By September 10, Flynn's Booty was offered to those who would buy at least $5 worth of Gaia Cash^[33]. By September 26, Flynn's Booty returned in the cash shop.^[34] Thirty minutes after the announcement, users started gathering evidence to link the sudden inflation to the release of Flynn's Booty^[35].

On September 19, Jason Loia, the COO of Gaia Interactive, made a presentation about gamification^[36] for Manos Accelerator, a mentorship program for Latino entrepreneurs^[37]. One of the slides (above, left) displays Flynn's Booty as an example, while another (above, right) elaborates on the application of Skinner's Box to games. By October 6, pictures of Loia's presentation began circulating within Gaia's forums^[38], and users were angered over being compared to lab rats and began seeing the management as the ones responsible for the hyperinflation. Rosann "Ling" Yip, another founder, announced her resignation shortly^[39], leaving Derek "Lanzer" Liu as the last remaining founder.

Users were already demanding the discontinuation of Flynn's Booty^[40] and the termination of both Schofield^[41] and Loia^[42], and the discovery of Loia's presentation fueled the users' efforts even further. The staff responded through discontinuing the weekly "Ask the Admins" threads^[43] where users can submit questions for the staff to answer, deleting threads and posts that mentioned the names of Schofield and Loia^[44][45], and banning those who insist on posting those names. Schofield and Loia, however, initially intended to outright ban everyone who mentioned them regardless of context.^[46] By December 16, Gaia made an unannounced update to its Terms of Service to prevent the recurrence of the events that led to the closure of the "Ask the Admins" threads. In comparison to the previous version^[47], the newly-amended version^[48] contained provisions against disparaging, ridiculing, and scorning Gaia, its employees, and officers [Sec. 4a]; and posting personal information (such as names) of Gaia employees [Sec. 4q]. In addition, Gaia added an amendment to allow them to revise the Terms of Service without notifying its users, reversing their previous stance of sending notices when updates are made [Sec. 3]. To circumvent censorship, users began giving Schofield nicknames like "Goldemort"^[49] and "he-who-must-not-be-named"^[50].

As a result, some users have left Gaia and went to other avatar-based forum sites where they shared their grievances over the site's operation^[51][52][53], while others resorted to vandalizing Gary Schofield's Crunchbase entry (as seen below), which sporadically persisted until November 2014, when Schofield's profile was deleted.

Subsequent gold generators

Despite the mass uproar and departures over the continued sale of Flynn's Booty, the staff said in a statement released on November that "there are a large number of users who do like these items"^[54]. In the next month, gold generators began receiving other names like "Divinity's Reach"^[55] and "Santa's Super Sack"^[56]. Succeeding gold generators were released with different names and increasing amounts of gold payouts.

Months after constantly-releasing gold generating items, some users were alerted that they were approaching the gold limit^[57] of 2,147,483,647 gold and that they were increasing the limit^[58] to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 gold^[59]. Shortly, new gold generators, starting with "Make It Pour", started offering amounts beyond the previous limit^[60]. Cassie "Princess Angelishia" Long, then the product manager of Gaia Online, said in the 2014 FanimeCon (and reiterated months later in a forum post) that they consider the marketplace as "still healthy and active"^[61][62]. However, according to "noraboo", wife of Golde and former site admin, her husband said that the inflation will last "forever, until the end of Gaia."^[63]

Gold sink events

Since June 12, 2014, Gaia Online has launched at irregular intervals Kickstarter-style events that are designed to drain excess gold from circulation.

The first such event, launched on that date, is Elysium's Gate^[64]. It was followed by Beach Party on June 25^[65], Hidden Tome on July 8^[66], Spirit of Summer on August 9^[67], Torii Gateway on September 15^[68], and Ivan's Timely Predicament on October 6^[69]. Such events have also been used to fund user-run events (12th Annual User-Run Ball, July 22^[70]; Tri-Town Showdown, September 3^[71]), restore an NPC shop that has been shut down (Save Our Louie, September 23^[72]), and be paired with real money donations to local charities (Charity Kickstarter, December 16^[73]).

However, such events often coincided with the sale of gold generators within a few hours. For instance, the gold generator "Crystal Ball" was being offered with a 60% discount two hours after the launch of Elysium's Gate^[74]; Spin the Wheel was released hours before Save Our Louie^[75]; and Plush Playmate appeared shortly after the Charity Kickstart began^[76].

Five-day moratorium

On July 12, 2014, Rainbow Gold Grab Bag, a gold generator worth 160 billion gold, was released.^[77] Five days later, however, Pile of Gold, the first of a series of gold generators worth one trillion gold, was released^[78]. Eventually, Gaia did a survey on July 23 to ask users about the site's features^[79]. From August 6^[80] to 11^[81], Gaia briefly stopped selling gold generators. At the end of the five-day moratorium on gold generators, modified gold generators began to be sold. Normal gold generators returned on August 26^[82].

Accusations of staff interference

On September 6, 2014, Gaia user "Gash Thrashum" noticed a sudden spike in the amount of marketplace revenue on the previous day.^[83] Gaia admin Nick "Zero Omega" Sylvanus immediately tracked down the source of the massive influx to the purchase of a Double Rainbow Ticket for 133 trillion gold, and NamesRina revealed that LicorSkein bought it from her^{[84] p. 2}. By September 7, however, a newly-registered user under the pseudonym of "Edward Snowden" speculated that LicorSkein is an alternate account owned by a staff member^{[83] p. 9}, and "Menstrual Cramps" eventually linked LicorSkein to then Gaia artist Veronica "bluealaris" Waite^[85]. Over the next few days, more alternate accounts suspected to be owned by Gaia staff were discovered, including one account that was linked to "Sandokiri", another site admin. Staff has admitted that LicorSkein is an account operated by staff^[86]. However, they did not comment on the status of the other accounts that were mentioned.

"Ask the Staff"

After the discontinuation of the weekly "Ask the Admins" threads on October 16, 2013^[43], no on-site feedback gathering events occurred until the launch of "Ask the Staff" was announced on October 10, 2014.^[87]

On the weekly event's debut on October 13, the staff admitted that they "are aware of the inflation issue on Gaia" and that they "doing everything … to address and resolve this important issue". However, they intend to make the economy "work in tandem with gold generators".^[88] When asked if gold generators would continue to be sold, they said that "they will be back on and off".^{[88] p. 44}

Limited-quantity gold generators

On February 18, 2015, Waite was promoted to the position of General Manager^[89]. The beginning of her tenure was marked with reduced gold generator outputs. Although this triggered complaints from gold generator buyers^[90][91][92], the reduced gold generator outputs contributed to price deflation. In March 15, she revealed that the total amount of gold circulating in Gaia "was reduced by one third"^[93].

The deflation lasted until the release of the Golden Chocolate Box, the first of a series of limited-quantity gold generators^[94] that has its output restored to its previous levels. Since then, most gold generators were sold for limited quantities only, and the total marketplace revenue hovered between 100 trillion and 200 trillion.

During an "Ask the Staff" session on April 27, Waite, when asked about the effect of the April 3 survey regarding continued gold generator sales, said:

…It’s extremely simple to say gold generators will never be sold again, but that would actually cause more damage than being helpful, and here is why:

Properly balanced gold generators allow us to make a certain amount of revenue that frees up our art and developer resources to work on features, new art and fixing old bugs. This is what it all boils down to – resources. … Simply looking at the Cash Shop at the only limited quantity items to sell out, most of them are [gold generator]s, and this conflicts with the message that users want them removed.

We have to look at situation as a domino effect. If gold generators are no longer sold, it would mean we would have a harder time hitting our daily / monthly goals. With goals not being hit, cuts will need to be made, either in art, features, or updates to the site. In the past, we set a wrong standard of things by not limiting the amount of gold that can be purchased. We understand that introducing gobs and gobs of gold into the economy is bad, but looking at the overall data, we have remained steady over the last couple months, and even a decline of gold in the economy.^[95]

Direct marketplace purchase with Gaia Cash

On June 26, Gaia Online released a new feature that enabled users to directly use Gaia Cash in buying items from the user-run marketplace.^[96] The sellers of the items do not receive Gaia Cash from the buyers; they instead receive an equivalent gold amount (initially fixed at 50 million gold for 1 cash) for the cash spent by the buyer^[97]. Although this feature is branded as an attempt to curb inflation and to eventually phase out gold generators^[98], Gaia users in the feedback thread perceive the feature as another gold-generating feature^[97].

Despite the release of this feature, gold generators continued to be sold. On August 18's "Ask the Staff" session, Waite revealed, "There will probably never be a point where [Gaia] never ever sell them again. That being said, this is a rare occasion and will likely not happen again for some time."^[99]

Liu's return and takeover

Gaia Online was put into an auction that eventually ended with Liu securing the top bid.^[100] On December 12, 2016, Schofield and Loia stepped down from their respective positions, and, with the support of a new investor team, Liu returned along with Gainsbrugh and Charles "CP" Park to assume control of Gaia Interactive^[101][102]. He counted stabilizing the economy among his top priorities and planned to eliminate gold generators^[103] and other features that allow direct conversion of real-life money into Gaia gold^[104].

On February 3, 2017, Liu revealed his plan to end gold generator sales on or before March 2017^[105]. The last gold generator item, Gold Truffle Box was released on January 31, 2017^[133], and the decision to discontinue them was made after two weeks^[134].

Revaulation

ON August 7, 2017, a new currency, platinum, was released^[136] at an exchange rate of 10 million gold per platinum^[137]. Although platinum will be the default currency for new users, gold won't be phased out yet. Currency grants in site features remain available in both currencies.

Controversial advertising methods

The advertising methods used by Gaia also came under fire. Since the release of Flynn's Booty, users often receive pop-up ads, announcements, and private messages mostly to advertise either gold generators or Gaia Cash.

Announcements

Gaia has begun sending more site-wide announcements^[106], mostly regarding Gaia Cash sales and gold generators since the first summer sale. According to data gathered by Gaia users "Zandy" and "Vagah", Gaia Online used to send no more than one announcement every day from January 2012 to January 2013. However, there is a noticeable gradual increase in the amount of cash-related announcements beginning in July 2013. By October 2013, the amount of cash-related announcements doubled compared to the previous month. At June 2014, they recorded a total of over 400 announcements for that month alone^[107]. Currently, users cannot opt out from receiving announcements, and a petition to have the option to disable them has gathered 485 signatures as of February 2017^[108].

Private messages

On September 10, 2013, Gaia sent private messages to users who have never bought Gaia cash before. The messages contained an offer of 25 free Flynn's Booties for buying at least $5 worth of Gaia Cash^[33]. The reaction of the users were more focused on the re-release of Flynn's Booty than on the sending of said messages.

On June 18, 2014, Gaia started offering "personalized, individual sales" to users through the private messaging system^[109]. In reality, however, all users received up to three identical private messages every day from the admin account for offers of a 30% discount on Gaia Cash^[110]. This led them into reporting the admin account for sending them spam messages until they were told to stop doing so^[111]. Afterwards, Gaia's Site Feedback forum was flooded with complaints over admin spam^[112]. The sticky thread that Sylvanus set up was overrun with complaints as well^[113]. By June 23, Gaia announced the end of the personalized discounts without acknowledging the feedback against the messages.^[114]

Notable responses

Glassdoor reviews

Anonymous reviews for Schofield can also be found on Glassdoor.com^[115], a job and career site where employees can anonymously dish on the pros and cons of their companies. In these reviews, Schofield is mostly met with negative reviews from former site staff (shown below), and had an approval rating of as low as 25% in April 2014^[116].

Resignations

Several staff members have also resigned. After the mass layoffs that marked the beginning of Schofield's tenure, Josh Gainsbrugh, a founder, was first to announce his resignation^[29]. Next was Rosann Yip^[39], another founder, amidst the controversy created by the discovery of Loia's slideshow for Manos Accelerator. Other employees like Chris "DJ Helsing" Castagnetto^[117] and Chris "Uncle Kenny" Fivecoate^[118] have followed suit. Although Castagnetto returned to organize official events as a contractor^[119], he was quoted to have said that "Gaia isn't what it used to be"^[61].

On August 23, 2014, Derek Liu, the last remaining founder, made a post in his Facebook profile (snapshot shown above) about his "last day at Gaia Interactive". A picture of the post was posted at the Chatterbox forum shortly^[120]. Users thought that Liu has resigned until he himself appeared in the forums to clarify that he will be "working at home at some new projects" and he "won't be showing up at the Gaia Office for a while".^{[120] p. 10}

Inflation rate calculations

Gaia user "im-all-at-sea" began in 2010 a poll that attempted to measure the distribution of wealth among users^[121]. However, he began noticing in September 2013 that more users are reporting gradually higher net worth over a few months. He thus began using the thread to track the inflation in Gaia's economy. Using the marketplace revenue as the source of data for calculations, he estimated the annual inflation rate at around 1.5 million percent. Gaia user Zandy, also basing on the total marketplace revenue, estimated an annual inflation rate of 8.5 million percent^[122] in December 2014.

Meanwhile, Reddit user Alexius08 posted in the /r/truegaming subreddit the yearly prices of selected items from Gaia Online from 2006 to 2013, and the monthly prices of the same items from August 2013 to August 2014^[12]. Using the data he gathered, he also estimated the annual rate of inflation at around 1 million percent.

2014 High-Tech Supply and Demand Summit

Jason Loia continued to represent Gaia Interactive in business conferences despite the controversy over his presentation for Manos Accelerator. On April 8, 2014, he delivered a lecture about virtual economies in the 2014 High-Tech Supply & Demand Summit^[123], where Gaia Online is used as the focal example.

During his lecture, he said about the ongoing inflation:

There's an interesting phenomenon where we're actually okay with inflation. If the money supply is growing, that's just virtual currency, but the virtual currency means that if people's balances are growing, it means people are getting richer in our community, and they're able to afford more stuff, right? So, the things we have to be careful about are can we keep up with the clip to make sure there's more Teslas and more Harley Sportsters out there to make sure people are buying at the right clip. 'Cause if there's not, you get the saturation of currency, and all of a sudden, you can buy everything you want and then you're done. We never want that to happen. We want to make sure there's always a good clip of really premium items out there for sale. And we don't mind so much that there's inflation as long as we can keep up with the goods.
…
We track what we call an aspirational basket of goods, so that's probably top 100 goods that we track. If you're a millionaire inside our system, you wanna buy all those. And we make sure that the average millionaire can't achieve all those aspirational basket of goods unless they give us a certain dollar figure. We don't wanna really publish that, but we'd like to think that if they're burning through their dollars, they're gonna be done with our site. That's a bad thing. We wanna make sure that aspirational basket of goods is always rich and filled.^[124]

Meanwhile, the third slide of his presentation^[125] shows an outdated marketplace revenue graph taken from a review of the site by MMOHuts^[126], which dates from February 2009.

In response to Loia's presentations, Gainsbrugh said that they "do not subscribe to any of the theories, research or strategy of the previous [Schofield and Loia's] management".^[135]

As a textbook example

On May 9, 2014, the MIT Press published a book by Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova entitled "Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis", where the virtual economy of Gaia Online is specifically cited as an example of hyperinflation:

…New users in the online community Gaia Online were complaining that they didn't have enough virtual currency to afford the items traded on Gaia's user-to-user marketplace. The publisher heard the complaints and responded by giving the users more currency. But all this meant was there was now even more currency competing for the same number of items, driving goods prices even higher. New users were left almost as disappointed as before.^[127]

Surveys

On July 23, 2014, Gaia staff launched a feedback survey for the site^[79]. Although the results of the survey were not released, it led to a five-day moratorium on gold generator sales.

On November 18, Gaia user "Chrissy The Hippy" ran an unofficial survey for the site^[128] through Google Forms, which gathered 485 respondents as of April 2015. The publicly-available results^[129] revealed that:

1. 66% of the respondents have at least 1 billion gold, yet 82.5% don't feel it's enough.
2. The usefulness of the site's games as a source of income has been rated at an average of 1.55 points out of 5, while the marketplace's average rating is at 3.41 points.
3. 96.3% see the inflation as a problem, and the efforts to fix it have been rated at 1.48 points.
4. The usefulness of the announcements was rated at 1.66 points.
5. 50.5% said that the staff aren't doing their best, while only 5.8% said the opposite. The rest were uncertain.
6. The respondents' likeliness to stay in the site within the next six months was rated at an average of 3.14 points, 1 being most likely to quit and 5 being most likely to stay.

After persistent requests^[130], Gaia staff launched on April 3, 2015,another official feedback survey^[131], which gathered 7142 respondents. The partially-released results^[132] revealed that:

1. Gold generators are the least-bought type of item, with only over 10% of the respondents reporting to have bought them.
2. Around 85% earn their gold through the marketplace, and almost 90% spend most of their gold there.
3. Releasing gold generators as limited-quantity items was viewed by 65% as a "Good start in the right direction", although it's unclear what "the right direction" refers to.
4. When asked about the respondents' foremost concern, the gold economy was ranked first with around 40% of the votes; the next highest concern, wealth disparity, got around 15% of the votes.

External References