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General: More on the Gaming Economy
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Last week in The Free Zone, MMORPG.com columnist Richard Aihoshi took a look at the economics of gold farming. Hot on the heels of Richard's article came a report from the World Bank Group's infoDev program that takes an even deeper look at the issue. Read on for Richard's thoughts on the report and then add some of your own in the comments.
The paper also serves up some interesting although questionable information on the companies that sell third-party gold and characters to consumers. It says typical retailers may be Chinese operations located in a regional capital. And they can be quite sizable. According to "an informant", eight in that country bring in over $10 million per year, while another 50 to 60 top the $1 million mark. What's more, they may source their goods from thousands of gaming studios.
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: More on the Gaming Economy.
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Comments
many companies are already trying to either get involved or put in game systems that make it unprofitable. eve online is one example with plex, only game i know where the developers put in a system where you can legally get isk for real world money, but as i understand it eve dont have a major problem with isk sellers either so maybe it works. eventually all game companies are gonna offer you gold for real world money, i think blizzard will be the first only because they are big enough they can afford to piss some people off when they do it, and still survive the backlash until it gets to be an accepted practice.
I'm constantly surprised that more MMOs haven't implemented a PLEX-style offering. It solves so many problems.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
It is more profitable for large publishers to have their dev houses pretend to take a stance against it, while either ignoring or fostering such behavior on the side. Take Blizzard for example: they like to knock out a few batches of accounts here and there for appearances, but in the long run, that one gold farming garage operation is a lot of subs for them. In the number of years that I spent in-game, I saw gold farmers and botters expand to the point that you could take a stroll through EP (this was pre-cata), and you could see at least half a dozen glide botters warp past you in the time it took to ride from one end to the other. I would wager that the number of players who don't get their account hacked, credit card information stolen, etc. by dealing with these people vastly outweighs the number of players who do, especially given how easy it is to spot their bad engrish schemes. Pure profit.
I think game developers realize that no one would play MMO's anymore if all you had to do to win was spend an ever increasing amount of money to get the best items, etc. Why do you think these companies spend so much money getting rid of these guys?
Unfortunately this is already the reality.
Many games already have a cash shop where you can buy things, which otherwise you have to play for.
So obviously there are many gamer's who like to be able to buy their way up, or why else would those farming bot industries, make so much money??
Additionally the producers just want more money, and they would even destroy the soul of a mmorpg to get that.
this is a one way street and we're already rolling on it.
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Evil UO has doomed my poor soul and now I'm wandering restlessly through all MMORPG's, desperately searching for a place to rest in peace.....
To me, I'd much rather see the publishers sell gold in the online store than what they are doing now with F2P. To me, selling gold is a whole lot better than selling exclusive items, power-ups, and card games.
When the game is designed around the acquisition of exclusive, account-specific items available only in the item store, entire sectors of design take a hit. We can't have crafting that's worth doing when the things that are worth having are available only in the item store. We can't have a player economy worth anything when the items that are worth having are acount-specific, non-tradeable, and available for real-life cash only.
Selling gold, to me, is a lot less problematic than item malls.
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"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Thank you, for rewriting the article, its much more informative this time around!
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