More tussling over RMTs. The New York Times has run a piece on virtual goods, focusing solely on the buy-sell experience in Second Life, much to the chagrin of Conduit Labs' Nabeel Hyatt:

This is a piece focused on the buying and selling of virtual items, and there is no mention of Maplestory, Habbo, or even Facebook and Hot or Not. For the press to remain ignorant of this being an industry and not simply a single product is now journalistic irresponsibility and they should be ashamed.

This is a member of the mainstream press that has not even managed to type "virtual goods" into Google. If they did, they would see the first three stories currently point to:

1) Sony getting into the game.
2) Susan Wu's article on Techcrunch about Virtual Goods being the next big business model for the web.
3) A link to the friggin' Virtual Goods conference, which would have mentioned all the above companies and many more.

He's got a point. With all the events going on this year discussing the RMT world, frequent venture capital investments in start-up efforts with a virtual goods component, and success stories from major companies like Nexon hitting the news so often these days, it seems like a huge miss for the Times -- especially when, as Hyatt also points out, the Nexon prepaid card is the #2-selling card at Target (where Habbo cards are also sold) behind iTunes.