Friday, January 22, 2010

Therebucks BuyBack (whoopie?)

Okay, so for those who don't know, MW (aka Mike Wilson, multi-millionaire owner/CEO of There aka Skippy) recently made a post in the There.com forums about a new Therebucks buyback program for There developers.
You can read it here, if you haven't already.

Naturally, there has been some discussion about this since the announcement came out, although as far as I know it has been a somewhat lackluster response limited to the developers section of the There forums, I suppose because this seems to be mainly of interest to developers (although in reality this could affect quite a few more There member than that.)

At first I wasn't sure what to think of the program, and to some degree I still don't, since a vague announcement and an actual working program are not really the same thing and it remains to see how this will actually be implemented, however, so far these are my thoughts (which I did post in the There forums but thought it would be appropriate to repost here):

(I'm happy to have anyone else add their thoughts here as well, feel free to leave a comment!)

This seems like bad news for people who enjoy buying Therebucks at an 11% discount (or more, depending on who you are buying from). So, good news for developers, assuming the queues aren't long, but bad for Therebucks buyers. Meanwhile, it does nothing to stop the resale scammers, in fact it may make those sites look MORE attractive to those who don't know better since reseller Therebucks are likely to become harder to find. (and so if people are getting less Therebucks for their money, it may come to pass that they simply have less Therebucks to spend and therefore the slight increase in value Devs get for their Therebucks may be offset by slightly lowered sales, not to mention the fee they will pay to There and the money some will lose if There does not use MassPay.)
Meanwhile, I think it gives an artificial sense of the strength of the There economy. In 2009, although my sales ended up being SLIGHTLY higher than in 2008, there seemed to be more people trying to sell Therebucks than ever. So whereas in the past it has always been normal for resellers to sell out and not have any Therebucks in stock, then be back in stock, then sell out again ad nauseum, and to oftentimes be out of stock more than in stock, for the second half of 2009 in particular, I have found myself almost NEVER out of stock...in fact I don't think I've run out of Therebucks for a few months straight now, and meanwhile my average Therebucks balance creeps ever higher.
This says to me that the amount of Therebucks going into the There economy is becoming more than the amount going out - a surplus that has never before occurred in There history (except for some temporary situations caused by Black Friday and the Coke Studios Therebucks conversion.) So it seems bizarre and unnatural for There to buy Therebucks from developers AT FACE VALUE, when obviously that is not at this time the actual value of Therebucks.
It doesn't stop scammers, people who like to buy discounted Therebucks will lose out (and there are more of them than there are devs) and they are being bought at an artificially high price from devs who have to wait in a queue to sell a limited amount at unknown intervals with a future promise that someday they'll be able to do exciting things like trade them for other currency (virtual?) Whoopie!