EverQuest and the UN

maddugan writes "NewScientiest.com has a piece on how EverQuest has spawned an economy with a per-captia income comparable to that of a small country. Mostly from profiteering on eBay. If it was indeed a country, it would rank 77th, just behind Russia." It'll be quite interesting to see what happens as MMORPGs gain popularity and absorb more and more man hours.

Comments

Duplicate post?

[Blackwulf]

Didn't we just hear about this the other day?

This article references the one we already had about the Norrath Economical Report...

The full research paper

[ehiris]

The full research paper on this can be found here

I tried to post this article last week but it seems like I did something wrong because it got rejected.

Re:A Bit Misleading

[Will_Malverson]

[On converting items to cash...]
Of course they aren't! If they were, the price for each item would be significantly lower, and the real GNP would be nowhere near what he is quoting. So in reality, if Norrath was a country, the GNP would not be as high as his estimate.
You can't "convert" an item to cash. All you can do is sell it to someone else for cash. Do you claim that, say, Egypt doesn't have an economy because the things produced there are rarely sold for dollars?

Here's an example of his argument: The game produces (via spawns or user manufacture) 10 swords of dragonthwacking per day. Those have an in-game value of 5000 platinum pieces. You can exchange pp for dollars on the open (though technically black) market at around 100:1. Thus, there are $500 worth of SoDs produced every day. Repeat these calculations for every item in the game, and from there you can figure out the GNP of Norrath.

Remember, GNP does not have anything to do with exports. GNP attempts to measure the complete value of the production in a country or place.

This is the same way that you can figure out, in dollars, the GNP of a place like North Korea. The closest analog to this would be to try to figure out how many things are sold by USians to USians for dollars in Mexico.

Re:Russia is not @ 77, it's at 17

[Peyna]

That'd the GDP, not per capita income. They were referring to GNI per capita; how much money each person in the country makes on average. Not how much money the country makes all together. In other words, Russia may be worth a lot of money, but that's just because they have a lot of people.

Re:Do these numbers add up?

[raju1kabir]

First of all, it's the per cap (and not absolute) GNP that was claimed to put Everquest right around Russia. That's pretty meaningless, as it's a self-selected group of people from the richest countries in the world who have a lot of time on their hands. I mean, the per cap GNP of my house is several times higher than that of the richest country in the world. So what?

Secondly, France's GDP in 2000 was $1,448,000,000,000, which is a thousand times greater than the number you posted.

The difference between GNP and GDP in a nutshell is that GNP includes income generated by multinationals based in that country. For instance, Microsoft's worldwide income accrues to the US GNP but only its US income is counted for the GDP.