Money for Nothin’
Believe it or not, there is a segment of society that makes a living (or at least a side-job) gathering items in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and then selling them for real money. So, for example, they might gather up tens of thousands of in-game currency (typically “gold” and “platinum”) and then resell it to other players too lazy to gather the money themselves or just too rich with actual cash to know what to do with it.
This “industry” has been around quite a while now. At first, it started with actual players who had created an avatar who had a lot of items and cash that were either leaving the game or just wanted to make some extra bucks. A former co-worker of mine did just that on Asheron’s Call back when that game was at its peak in popularity. He sold off his money, weapons, armor and characters for real-world money. He earned enough to buy a nice car with the money. That is correct: He bought a car by selling fake, in-game items.
Now, however, this has turned into an industry that makes money; A lot of money. A recent study done by Manchester University puts the money earned as high as $500 million dollars. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Lineage are all plagued by this problem.
The study also admits that because this selling of gold and items is, at best, border-line legal the number could be much higher.
These “gold farmers” (as these people are called that gather up in-game money only with the intent of selling it later) are in laborers coming out of China. These “farmers” are paid about $150 per month to gather up gold to resell for actual money. It is believed that there are 400,000 such people employed world-wide with 80% coming from China.
Now, being caught engaging in such activities does mean that the account-holder loses their account. But it is hard to prove, particularly if they are selling via a parent-company.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time playing MMOs knows about gold farmers. They send in-game spam shouting about how they have money and in-game items to sell cheap. They send out e-mail spam as well. So knowing that this happens is not a surprise. Seeing how large it is, however, comes as a huge shock.
In my mind it was one thing when my former co-worker sold off his on-line stuff and bought a car. He didn’t play the game with that intent – he was just done playing the game and thought it would be a great way to get some extra cash. No harm done, just some people with more money than sense bought his stuff and all sides were happy.
However, this gold-farming as a profession takes the concept too far. These are not people playing for the enjoyment of the game. These are people playing as a career to raise money and items for other people who for whatever reason want the cool stuff more than they want to actually play the game.
Worse, it is turning into some kind of sweatshop in developing nations.
So is there a solution for this problem? Not really – trading items in-game (for other in-game items) is a legit and large part of any MMORPG. So policing this by the game companies becomes difficult. Perhaps they could monitor those that seem to be trading too often?
But beyond that, those that play the games need to take responsibility and not buy items like this. Get the items through in-game trade or by playing the game. Purchasing powerful items, in-game currency and even high-level avatars just wreaks the game for everyone else (and believe me, everyone knows who you are when they see you, a level-50 guy, asking how to do basic tasks) and is now, officially, socially irresponsible.
Note: This was written by me and originally posted at the Rising Tide blog.
