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In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry
SpuriousLogic brings us this excerpt from a BBC report:
"Prof. Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by, but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m. ... Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry. 'The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000,' said Prof Heeks. 'Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.' Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the 'virtual offshoring' likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace. "
We discussed the life of a gold farmer last year.
Might as well get it out of the way.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/02/16/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/14/
I think they have stopped now, or got kicked out, I havent seen any more similar activity from the bunch....
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Just another example that I don't deserve my nice house and cushy job. Some people are pretty desperate for the spare change that falls from American (and euro, there does that make you happy...) tables.
They worked all day for the same money I made reading this article at work.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
When I was unemployed, I saw the gold farmers as a scourge, letting people pay to get stuff for nothing.
Now that I have a job, and next to no time to play the games I like, it pisses me off that I never have the in-game cash to get the stuff I'd need to play alongside my friends without letting them down.
It's a real shame on both ends of the spectrum. Them, for giving people the easy way out, and the game makers, for requiring so damn much of a time investment.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
What is this? A reverse-psychology 419 scam in action?
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the existence of WoW is, overtly, to have fun
but if you are employing someone to heighten your fun, all you are really doing is distancing yourself from the true pleasure of the game. you are talking about people who do not know how to enjoy the gaming experience
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id. its people mistaking the pursuit of pleasure with the pursuit of heightening your self-regard. when you conflate the two, you actually destroy your own happiness (though you don't realize this) because you are no longer solely concerned with pleasure, but winning. of course winning is pleasurable, but winning at all costs deadens pleasure, it doesn't heighten it. this is especially true of your actions and their effects on the happiness of others, by warping how the game experience exists for them
gold farming indicates a philosophical and psychological disconnect between the point of something like WoW and what people actually do with it. they turn fun, into work
that's just wrong in some extremely fundamental way, and shows you why true happiness is so fleeting in this world: we destroy our own happiness by actively placing the pursuit of happiness secondary to the pursuit of some other, lesser goal, out of your own blindness and forgetting what is important, especially in the context of something like WoW
i'm not saying trying to use the game in ways not as originally intended is wrong no matter what. you can use WoW to do lots of interesting things that isn't what the game was intended for. what i am saying is that this particular unintended game experience, gold farming, is odious and toxic to the expeirence of everyone, including those employing the gold farmers, they just don't know it, as they are blind to their own philosophical and psycholigcal failures that lead them away from the pursuit of happiness and instead towards the pursuit of ego tweaking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not the 12 year olds who buy high-level gear: the kids are the ones with more time than money. It's the busy thirty-somethings who want to have fun for a couple hours a week that pull out their credit cards to buy gold.
THAT'S NOTHING... I farm Karma on Slashdot for $0.12/hour
Gold farming is in some ways comparable to illegal immigration in the US. It is technically against the law, but covertly tolerated, because things would break down if it didn't happen.
The day that players start getting banned en-masse for buying gold is the day that Blizzard gets tired of making money.
This just in! People get paid to do work others don't want to do! Details at 11.
In short, Blizzard should be selling the gold. They'd get money, it would be easier on their servers, and the money would go towards American interests, not Chinese ones.
Fashion designers, Dry cleaners, Professional Athletes, Nail salons, and now, virtual gold miners.
Bless you all - as long as you are earning money and keeping off the welfare roles, I applaud you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
the idea of grinding killed mmo's for me. please someone show me an mmo based on skill, rather than who has the most free time!
There are games like that. They're call real-time strategy games, or first-person shooters.
Yeah, With EvE online you can lose all your stuff when you die, and isk farmers TOTALLY aren't an issue there. Oh... wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Excerpt from Brandon Sheffield article on Gamasutra :
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18510
It was Blueside who first introduced the idea to me, cynically stating that consoles won't succeed in Korea until players start just playing games for fun, instead of treating them as work. I laughed then, but subsequent meetings only served to confirm the theory.
Companies from Gravity to Ntreev to Nexon agreed that a very large number - varying from 30 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask - of players in South Korea are playing games as a job. Generally, people didn't feel too good about it either, which at least indicates that people aren't designing them with that as a goal. But it's still disconcerting.
And as any player of Lineage2 can attest, some Korean MMOs really ARE designed to be grindfests and farming prone.
From L2 official boards :
PushyCat on official boards:
So, Koreans play and sell in their own servers and it covers the cost of their PC Room and meals. This is a normal aspect of Korean games. Listen to me while I say this. Ebaying is NOT CONSIDERED CHEATING in KORea. It is an important element of mmporgs. With game money, not only can you sell it to make cash, you can also order pizza, buy computers and accessories (like auto mouses, keyboards, macroprograms), and pay for your monthly fee (for those who play at home). In Korea, game money is an accepted tender for Real Life. Noone posts on message boards about cheaters, ebayers, and bots because EVERYONE does it. In Korea, the game is played much differently than in North America, and asians have different cultural backgrounds that make gameplay different as well.
Why buy a game then pay somebody else to play it?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The game is a mess and one of the messes is items you "have" to buy ingame.
If you want extra inventory space you need to buy bags but most important are horses since the game has very little instant travel.
250 gold for the highest level mounts in total (might be 300 forgot exactly) and 3 gold for your first set of horse and riding skill. Problem? When you reach the level for your first mount you got maybe, if you sold EVERYTHING and saved up constantly and grinding some gold 50 silver.
So paying a gold farmer makes sense. Early prices made your first horse cost 10-15 dollars. Not to bad.
But when the game had launched I did the math from the constant gold spams and a level 80 mount would have set you back 1300 euros.
Prices dropped of course BUT when I left you still looked at several hundred euro's, for a horsy.
I think gold farmers don't so much get 10 bucks from every MMORPG player but a 1000 from people with more money then brains.
Sure, you can say that for some people money == time but seriously, who is willing to pay so much money just for a game that you obviously don't actually want to play?
Now Age of Conan is a bad example as it is an incredibly badly designed MMORPG, want horse mounted combat, try Mount&Blade and give this game a wide birth but I think it is an accurate way of seeing how gold farmers work, they don't even pretend to offer a reasonable product, they basically offer the same service dog-walkers offer. All the fun of having a dog without doing anything with said dog. It is for people that want an epic mount but never play with it.
But I am not entirely suprised by these figures, after all the korean "pay for ingame items" approach makes gold farming a natural extension, if you are paying for items already why not buy gold as well.
For some games, like WoW and AoC it seems logical because if you make a decent wage why not pay someone to grind for you.
But I think most gamers would rather game themselves since gold is hardly cheap if you are still making minimum wage.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because grinding isn't playing. Why pay to not play?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Some people LIKE to grind. Don't ask me why, I'll never get it but I know a number of WoW players that enjoy grinding. So WoW provides grinding for them to do, and rewards for it. Blizzard's theory seems to be that whatever you like to do, they are going to give you plenty of it to do and rewards for doing it. You want to do 5-mans? Go to it. Want to PvP? Sure. Whatever you like, you can do it.
The problem comes from people who aren't playing the game for fun, but playing because they want to be better than other people. The want to have the best gear, most stuff, etc. Thus they run in to things that are grind rewards. They don't want to do those, so they buy gold instead.
The grind isn't the problem, the people who don't play to have fun are.
While goldfarming is a problem and in my opinion hurts the game in the long run, there's something that bothers me more. Account hacking. Account hacking is a professional business these day and it hurts players directly. Their accounts are robbed from every penny their gear which they obtained over hours of doing dungeons or farming, playing the game gets sold for a bit of cash and they're left with one ore more naked Characters. While people may say: gold buying is harmless, it's from Chinese farmers anyway, that's not true. If you are buying gold, you are paying someone else to hack into your fellow players accounts. Think about that.
put the words "free tibet" somewhere in the game.
I dunno - I'm 32 and I've never bought any gold, but I've managed to buy 4 epic mounts/training on 4 characters (thats 20,000~g for those who don't play - and one of the main reasons I'm sure people buy).
Its the 12 year olds who always ask me how I make so much money - its really simple actually (and I don't grind for the most part) - do quests and don't spend it on crap. You'll never make money selling stuff in WoW - typically the materials for making anything are worth more than the items usually sell for.
There are grinds in WoW but most of them can be combined with quests, dungeons and raids - which I enjoy doing.