I had to do a research paper on the virtual economy of online gaming once. In second life it was mostly layed off programmers that found out that people were willing to pay big to design everything from homes, interior, clothing, etc.
How To Make Money In Second Life
The online virtual world, Second Life, recently crowned it’s first real life millionaire. This milestone brings home the fact that virtual worlds with real economies are going to be a huge part of the internet’s future. Maybe bigger than YouTube in the same way that video games overtook the revenues of the film industry simply because players can interact with the story. In Second Life you are the story.
But the virtual economy goes back quite a ways, as soon as they started putting up dedicated servers that people could log into and interact with one another they immediately started trading virtual goods for real world currency. Ever hear the term Evercrack used for the game Everquest? Then there is World of Warcraft and that's when things really went nuts.
People started paying big dollars for virtual items and character accounts.
This is one of many websites that sells stuff for WoW:
Buy WoW Accounts, Buy World of Warcraft Accounts - On SALE!
Characters go for hundreds to thousands of dollars, same things with "items". And some people will do really insane **** for this game:
Woman offers sex for an ingame animal to ride See pics
here.
Then there are the sweat shops...Mexico, China, Vietnam, someone will buy a room full of computers and pay people next to nothing to play and accumulate items or ingame currency (ie gold), then they'll go and sell it online for real world currency and meet you ingame to do the transfer. Mining, grinding, it goes by a number of names.
I had a coworker that was divorced and paying insane child support and alimony, he'd get off work and go home and escape to WoW. He'd build up characters then turn around and sell them to make extra money.
Eve Online is another game with a thriving economy...there was an event where a player betrayed his group and netted ingame currency that held a real world currency of about $16K.
Its been around for 8 years with 13 million members. Id say beta testing has long passed.
:biggrin:
I will sale you all you want:biggrin:
