In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry 201
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.
Re:mmo's waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:mmo's waste of time (Score:3, Informative)
There are games like that. They're call real-time strategy games, or first-person shooters.
Re:Oblig... (Score:4, Informative)
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765585510&sid=1 [worldofwarcraft.com]
Well, look at Age of Conan (Score:3, Informative)
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.