[arohner]

Valve's games put a cap on real prices by selling the items through Valve's store. You can buy a new gun for $2, so the price of the gun in "ebay gold" will never rise above $2.

(Big simplification for TF2 players follows) Also, in TeamFortress 2 (Valve's biggest virtual economy), it's difficult to farm gold. Logged in players receive 1 gold/hr, capped at a max of 10 gold/week. It's possible to create new accounts, and run all of them concurrently, but the expected gain is fairly low, and you have to pay Valve real money for the privilege of having extra accounts.

The exchange rates are also totally asymmetric. The exchange rate for money into gold is approximately $1 => 81 gold. The exchange rate for gold back into real money is ambiguous. There isn't a liquid market here. It involves finding rare in-game hats that aren't sold in the valve store, and selling them on e-bay for $100-$400.

The hypothetical gun might cost $2 on the valve store, but 1 gold in game (i.e less than 1% of the store price). This strongly incentivizes players to trade in-game.

It's possible to make a profit by trading with humans, but that's labor intensive (because you have to find the player and haggle), and probably seen as a positive for Valve, because the traders are providing liquidity.

[prezjordan]

But not every item is available in the store. The ones that aren't - unusual hats, super-rare "glitch" items, community weapons - sell for hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

One such "glitch" is known as a "vintage scrap metal" which only a few exist in the game. They popped up when a user would delete their metal and ask valve to put it back, when they did, it showed up as "vintage scrap metal" with blue text. Such metal has sold for over $1,000.

I feel much of the TF2 economy (these items that can't be bought in a store) is simply players holding onto the weapons and working together to sky-rocket the price. Now, people refer to a "spreadsheet" which is set by a group of individuals. Everyone follows this spreadsheet religiously.

For small items, I think the TF2 economy is very neat. But for rare items? A mess.

[arohner]

After I wrote this last night, I'm now leaning towards the idea that the "rare item" economy is intentional, and working as designed.

In effect, by making it difficult to turn virtual gold into money, and allowing rare items to sell on EBay, Valve is paying a small number of traders to provide a liquid market.

I'm aware of the spreadsheet, but I think you overstate its importance. Sure, people are aware of the book value, but just like real life, people pay more or less than the book value according to their desire.