Study: Gold Farming $500M Industry, Ties to Criminal Underworld

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Gold farming in games like World of Warcraft is now an industry worth an annual $500 million, according to a study from Manchester University reported by BBC News.

Gold farming, which allows users to use real money to purchase in-game currency in massively multiplayer games, has become a controversial issue in the genre.

Professor Richard Heeks, himself a gamer, turned his academic eye to gold farming and found that the industry currently employs an estimated 400,000 people --80% of which are in China-- making an average of $145 per month.

"I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry," said Heeks. "In a way that is still true. It's just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands."

Steven Davis, the chief of online game security firm Secure Play, claims that the criminal underworld has gotten involved. "These [gangs] pay for their accounts with stolen credit cards, take money from players and do not hand over gold or goods in return and fill chat channels with adverts for websites hawking game gold."

Prof. Heeks also compared gold farming to India's tech outsourcing industry, which has roughly double the workers of the gold farming industry but is "still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile."

Interestingly, the Chinese gold farming industry has outsourcing of its own. Vietnamese labor, which is cheaper than Chinese labor, means "they now do for Chinese gamers what many in China do for those in the West."

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    August 25, 2008 10:24 AM

    I find this claim of $500M hard to believe. I bet its just a hyped up number to make the study sound better.

    • reply
      August 25, 2008 10:29 AM

      don't be ridiculous, the studies have to back up their numbers and unlike you, they actually have.

      • reply
        August 25, 2008 2:57 PM

        well he has a point, unless you or myself have run the numbers or checked his numbers and sources, we don't really know. Companies report BS on a balance sheet all the time, they don't always get caught even when they "show their work"

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        August 25, 2008 4:05 PM

        Well the numbers in the article don't even add up, so it's hard to take it seriously when the basic math is so far off. 400,000 farmers earning $145 avg per month for 12 months per year is $696 million per year. At least one of the quoted numbers is erroneous.

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      August 25, 2008 10:33 AM

      Eh I don't know. WoW alone I imagine they make absurd amounts of money, every server I've played on has been plagued with gold sellers/bots, and I know several people who have admitted paying for gold. I don't think it's that far fetched a figure given the massive playerbase of the mmo industry.

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        August 25, 2008 10:48 AM

        A couple of my buddies that I got hooked on wow - who kept playing well after I quit (one still goes on every now and then) they split the charges a couple of times for purchasing 5k of WoW gold. But then after that they really didn't need to anymore as they were farming end game gear and auctioning it off at ridiculous prices.

      • reply
        August 25, 2008 11:10 AM

        FFXI is another major market for gold (Gil in FFXI's case) sellers. Even basic equipment costs tons of money due to the massive amounts of inflation the game suffers from.

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      August 25, 2008 10:47 AM

      I would have been impressed if they said $25 million. Half a billion is a job for Sam Fisher.

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      August 25, 2008 12:18 PM

      I agree. In wow now days you would be stupid to buy gold you can easily farm the amount you need in a matter of hours, and not risk banning doing it. Back in pre BC days I could see this.

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