Extensive Data on Buying and Selling Gold in WoW. Make $635,000 From Virtual Property in Entropia?

Today Marco published a blog post regarding buying and selling gold, or in general, the sale of virtual items. Let’s face it, there are at least a good amount of people that engage in this activity, otherwise the gold selling companies wouldn’t exist. This is commonly called RMT or Real Money Trading. Geek Dictionary defines this as:

Definition: Real Money Trade; when a player exchanges real money for ingame items or ingame currency.

Usage: Noobs with no skills have to RMT to get that leet gear.

Buying and Selling WoW Gold

In short, it works both ways for buying and selling. There are various MMO’s and virtual economies that exist and some of them even allow the act of RMT such as the MMO Entropia Universe which has an exchange rate of 10 virtual currency to $1. However, as far as Blizzard and the World of Warcraft game goes, it is against the Terms of Service to do it. There is been significant controversy regarding buying and selling gold. There has even been a 80-page research paper on the topic. It is estimated that the sale of just virtual currency generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually. In contrast, the U.S. Video Game Industry And PC Game Software Retail Sales totaled $19.6 billion in 2009.

Here is some research that we found about some of the figures that are related to the sale of virtual goods:

While reliable figures for gold farming are hard to come by, as is the case with most illicit activities, there are some estimates of the market for in-game currency.

In 2005 The New York Times stated that there were over 100,000 professional, full-time gold farmers in China alone. And in 2006 sales of such virtual goods were thought to amount to somewhere between 200 and 900 million USD.

Another estimate, drawn from 2005/2006 data, valued the market at not less than USD 200 million per year and suggested that over 150,000 people were employed as gold farmers with average monthly earnings of USD 145. This same report estimated that 80% of all gold farmers were from China, a fact which has led to prejudice towards Chinese players. 2008 figures from the Chinese State valued the Chinese trade in virtual currency at over several billion yuan, or nearly USD 300 million.

Source: Wikipedia.org

$635,000 Sale of Virtual Property

Now you may be reading this article because of the title and wondering who just made half a million dollars on virtual property? Well in November 2010, there was a story about a man who sold a record breaking $635,000 in a single transaction for virtual property for the MMO Entropia Universe. This just blows my mind! After doing some digging on why someone would pay this much it started to make sense. In short, the property in the game actual brings in an income with very little work. RMT is also legal and encouraged in this game. They buyer was basically making an investment that should pay off in less than a few years. The seller of the property “Club Neverdie” as making around $200,000 a year already before deciding to sell it. We decided to check out the game for ourselves and we would assume some readers of this site may do the same. Some interesting facts about the game is:

• Entropia is a free to play MMO
• The graphics are amazing since it uses CryEngine 2 (Crysis graphics)
• You start off with almost nothing
• You can deposit real money to gain the in-game currency PED.
• You can also cash out PED into real dollars at a 10:1 ratio.
• There is also an in-game hall of fame, if my math is correct, this crafted item is worth over $20,000 USD.
• The idea is you need to spend some real money to gear up your toon, then proceed to kill mobs and do various things that pay PED.
• For example, buying good ammo so you can kill higher level mobs, which drop PED, then you convert that into real money.
• You can own and generate income from virtual property.
• If you are rich enough, you can own banks, but you need a banking license that costs $100,000 USD.
• MMO Hut did a quick overview of the game if you want to learn more about it.

Now we are interested in what our readers have to say about this topic and Entropia. Although I don’t have the time to play another MMO, are some of our pro-auctioneers willing to test their skills in a game where real money is at stake? Keep in mind this article was not written to promote gold buying/selling or the games we talked about. We hope that we informed our readers a little bit more about this commonly misunderstood industry.