How Do Professional Gold Farmers Operate?
China is a popular place for professional gold farming operations. In Nanjing, China, a gold farmer named Chen Jialong sits shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the computer screen showing the online computer game that he was playing.
The Chinese gold farming operation is a $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money.
Collectively these Chinese gold farmers employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms.
So for twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Chen does — for a living.
MMORPG players are always looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. In a game such as World of Warcraft, every World of Warcraft player needs those coins as well.
And this is for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.
The Professional Chinese Gold Farmer
At the end of each shift, Chen reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Chen makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less.
The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.
The market for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, known as MMORPGs, is a fast-growing one, with no fewer than 80 current titles and many more under development, all targeted at a player population that totals around 30 million worldwide.
Players of MMORPG’s are notoriously obsessive gamers, not infrequently dedicating more time to the make-believe careers of their characters than to their own real jobs. Indeed, it is no mere conceit to say that MMORPG’s are just as much economies as games.
In every one of them, there is some form of money, the getting and spending of which invariably demands a lot of attention: in World of Warcraft, it is the generic gold coin; in Korea’s popular Lineage II, it is the “adena”; in the Japanese hit Final Fantasy XI, it is called “gil.”
And in all of these games, it takes a lot of this virtual local currency to buy the gear and other battle aids a player needs to even contemplate a run at the monsters worth fighting.
To get more currency, players have a range of virtual income-generating activities to choose from: they can collect loot from dead monsters, of course, but they can also make weapons, potions and similarly useful items to sell to other players or even gather the herbs and hides and other resources that are the crafters’ raw materials.
Repetitive and time-intensive by design, these pursuits and others like them are known collectively as “the grind.”
Illegal Gold Farming
For players lacking time or patience for the grind, they are willing to trade their hard-earned legal tender — dollars, euros, yen, pounds sterling — to buy in-game currency from other players. And despite strict rules against the practice in the most popular online games, there have always been players willing to sell.
The phenomenon of selling virtual goods for real money is called real-money trading, or R.M.T., and it first flourished in the late 1990s on eBay.
MMORPG players looking to sell their virtual armor, weapons, gold and other items would post them for auction and then, when all the bids were in and payment was made, arrange with the highest bidder to meet inside the game world and transfer the goods from the seller’s account to the buyer’s.
However, in recent years, the vast majority of virtual goods has been brought to retail not by players selling the product of their own gaming but by high-volume online specialty sites like the virtual-money superstores IGE, BroGame and Massive Online Gaming Sales — multimillion-dollar businesses offering one-stop, one-click shopping and instant delivery of in-game cash.
