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Role Playing (Games) The Almighty Buck

There's Gold In Them Thar Games 33

Posted by Zonk from the quit-your-job-and-start-farming dept.
Via Terra Nova, the New York Times (reg. required) has a piece discussing the increasing trend of players making serious money off of MMOGs. They cite one gentleman who is able to pay his monthly mortage thanks to his daily ventures into the virtual spaces of Second Life. From the article: "Mr. Ainsworth, 36, was not a fan of online games until his 10-year-old daughter became interested in The Sims Online. He then noticed that a large number of simoleans were for sale on eBay. 'I started hearing about players leaving the game who were selling their assets...so I figured, buy low, sell high.'"
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There's Gold In Them Thar Games More

There's Gold In Them Thar Games

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  • Real Life? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone here actually tried this, and what were the results?
    • It's fun, but the monthly fees are outrageous. Stay away!

      • Re:Real Life? (Score:3, Informative)

        by jafuser ( 112236 )
        If you're referring to SL, you only pay a monthly fee if you want to be a landowner. Otherwise, you can pay US$10 one-time charge for a Basic account, which doesn't expire or recur (landowners pay the server costs).

        Currently your inventory is unlimited, so not having land isn't that big of a deal unless you want to open a store or build something you wish to persist. There are sandbox regions for people who don't own land who want to build things and store them in their inventories. And of course you can

    • Has anyone here actually tried this, and what were the results?

      Me.

      At the height of my "City of Heroes" addiction, I paid like 30 or 40 USD for "influence" (it's version of Gold).

      Now that I've "quit the habit" I feel rather stupid for doing it. It mean, for the cost of a new game I simply upgraded my experience on an MMORPG. It made sense at the time, as the extra influence made gaming a lot more efficient (could boost my powers considerably). But now...

      God, I gotta make sure I don't get hooked on

  • Article text because registration sucks ass (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30, 2005 @10:57AM (#12676428)
    By MARK WALLACE
    Published: May 29, 2005

    JASON AINSWORTH plays the online game Second Life at least four hours a day. In the game, he runs a virtual real estate development business. But his after-tax profit - about $1,800 a month - is real, and it's enough to pay the mortgage on his home in Las Vegas.

    For many people, what are known as massively multiplayer online games have become significant sources of income.

    Web sites have sprung up that allow players to use real currency to buy items - like weapons or real estate - that they may want or need for the games.

    Games like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online and dozens of others offer the opportunity to interact with thousands of players worldwide in virtual environments that continue to exist whether or not any particular person is playing at the moment. The virtual broadsword you found in the dragon's cave (or that dream house you built) before logging off on Tuesday will be right there on Wednesday.

    Acquiring those items, however, requires work. In Ultima Online, it can take weeks to amass enough virtual gold to buy a superior weapon. It can take just as long to earn enough "simoleans," the virtual currency of The Sims Online - the online version of Electronic Arts' best-selling role-playing games - to buy and furnish a house.

    But not everyone cares to spend time toiling in pursuit of game money. This provides an opportunity for people like Mr. Ainsworth. A thriving market has sprung up in which players spend real-world cash to buy game currency or desirable items from other players. Transactions take place on eBay or on sites like gamingopenmarket.com or www.ige.com. Payments are made through PayPal and other online services. Players then log into the game and transfer the virtual goods or currency.

    Mr. Ainsworth, 36, was not a fan of online games until his 10-year-old daughter became interested in The Sims Online. He then noticed that a large number of simoleans were for sale on eBay. "I started hearing about players leaving the game who were selling their assets," he said, "so I figured, buy low, sell high."

    But Mr. Ainsworth found his moneymaking options in The Sims "very limited"; he switched to Second Life, a virtual world that is less a game than a three-dimensional environment in which players can do whatever they choose. There, he has leveraged his real-life experience - he is a developer and contractor - into an online business. In 14 locations in Second Life's virtual world, he owns enough "land" to rent space to nearly 50 retailers, who in turn earn virtual money selling everything from jewelry to clothing to art (all nonexistent, of course). Mr. Ainsworth converts his game profits into real money on sites like eBay, Ige and gamingopenmarket, which charge a small fee, and he includes that income on his tax returns.

    "A lot of your success or failure depends on your ability to keep the fire lit," he said. "I have good months and bad months, but the work is fun."

    Earnings can be considerable. Ailin Graef, who goes by the screen name Anshe Chung in Second Life, said she was on track to earn about $100,000 in real money in her first year in the game's real estate business.

    Hundreds of people who play Second Life make a profit on it, said Philip Rosedale, chief executive and founder of Linden Lab, the game's developer. The value of the average player's transactions, if converted to real money, is more than $1,000 a year and has been growing nearly 25 percent a month, Mr. Rosedale said.

    Who buys this stuff? One Second Life resident, who asked to be identified only by her screen name, Diamond Hope, said she spent $10 to $15 a month on clothing and other accessories in Second Life, but would spend more if she could afford it. "With all the things you can buy in Second Life," she said, "it's hard not to want them, just like real-life stuff."

    In the open-ended environment of Second Life, players are provided with a host of powerful tools that can be us

  • BTL = Better Than Life (Score:4, Funny)

    by conan776 ( 723791 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @10:59AM (#12676444)
    Ah, so what you could do is create a 3rd Life game inside Second Life for people to play, sell that money for 2nd Life money, and that money for In Real Life money.

  • WoW IRA (Score:4, Funny)

    by NightWulf ( 672561 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @11:11AM (#12676513)
    It's true, I put in a few hours of WoW a day in, and i'm up to 10000 gold pieces. When i'm ready to retire, with Gold at over $480 an ounce, Whooooo i'll be rolling in the dough. How can I go wrong? All I need to do is contact this Blizzard company, they must be a brokerage of some sort.

  • meh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blackicye ( 760472 )
    Second Life may well be possibly the only game he could do this in.

    Most likely because noone cares about it, and the market for its in-game currency and commodities is tiny.

    Any game which has a larger audience (WoW, SWG, Lineage 2, Guildwars, EQ2) would have seen its slew of dedicated "farmers" from Korea, China, India and various parts of SE Asia.

    Either with sweat shop labor or automated with bots, they farm in-game currency and items and sell them at a far lower price than anyone in more developed coun

    • Re:meh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jesrad ( 716567 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:24PM (#12677644) Journal
      Except that this is Second Life, not WoW. There are no monsters you can kill over and over and over for hours on to earn a sustainable revenue, much like there is no infinite gold mine in the real world either. No trivial/automatic way to turn time into value. The money you earn has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is : other players. Each player receives a somewhat fixed stipend of money each week from Linden Lab, and this amount is revised from time to time to accomodate with the money that returns to Linden Lab continuously (as a payment for uploads or land allotment).

      Because of this, you cannot have a sweatshop in Second Life, and its economy has zero inflation.
      • No sweatshop?

        Take a look at Dark Life, and think about the possibilities.
        • For those who don't know, Dark Life is an attempt to bring a Diablo-like game to Second Life. Of course it can be abused by a tentative sweatshop, but since it is owned by players (whom I happen to know personnally), there is an absolute cap on how much money you can make on it. And trust me that limit is very low (especially right now) so you can't make a profitable sweatshop out of it (it's not profitable to the owners already !).

          If you mean making a game like Dark Life in SL to make money, well, you'll
    • As an aside they have totally destroyed the in-game economies of most of these games, which is generally why the sale of in-game currency is in violation of the Terms of Service.

      What about the legal issues involved with gambling? Facilitating illegal games of chance for value is an expensive crime in many jurisdictions. If you take away the official cash value of items via a EULA you create a legal defense.

      • There is no official cash value for the Second Life currency (L$). You can't buy more L$ from the company that runs SL, and they will not buy back your L$ for US$.

        Exchanges between L$ and US$ is done between residents (usually via third party websites), and the value fluctuates with supply and demand. See Gaming Open Market [gamingopenmarket.com] for an example of how the currency is exchanged as a commodity.

        The amount of L$ in the SL economy is fixed via a specific formula and is not affected by these third-party currency ex
    • Actually, Second Life already has seen reports of sweatshop laborers. In this case, it appears they were trying to collect and hoard land, which is arguably the most scarce resource in Second Life. Any time you have a limited, transferrable resource, you have an opening for this kind of activity. It seems to me the only way to combat it is to either make the resource unlimited or non-transferrable.
    • Its hard to "farm" money in Second Life because there are no Walking Bags of Advancement wandering around to club over the head and take their stuff. You get money the same way you do in real life -- convincing other people to give it to you. In practice, the big ticket items are selling real-estate (which is a limited commodity in the system which gets dribbed in at a predictable rate), casinos, and selling customizations for avatars (clothes, accessories with no effects that a WoW player would recognize

  • its true... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i made some 3d content just for fun for mmog http://www.there.com/ [there.com], one item was so popular i made about $3000 AUD off it... and through 3rd party web sites was able to turn in-world currency back to real dough :)
  • About a year or so ago I was playing on Second Life and had fun spending the virtual money they gave you on the slot machines/ gambling devices people had made. The problem is, the game is only as good as the script that it runs on. There was this video poker machine that would pay out a Royal Flush on any hand you got that was a straight (with A, K, Q, J, 10) which is much easier to get and it paid out some crazy amount of cash. I took so much cash from the guy that was running the machine that he didn'

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