Getting rich through playing video games

Blog post 8

Although video games have long been considered for entertainment purposes only, the advancements in MMORPGs have turned many gamers into sly businesspeople selling in-game items or money for real life items or money.

Sites such as IGE are, to put into simple words, making money off of another company. They focus on selling in-game items and gold in popular online games such as World of Warcraft, Aion, Final Fantasy, or Lineage to players for real-life revenue. As to the method at which these companies, often referred to as "gold sellers" or "gold spammers" (when their avatars are seen in-game), they either negotiate underground deals with the online game, or use an army of bots to "farm" (collect) in-game gold and items. While it is usually slow to accumulate any wealth with only one in-game avatar, with multiple computers and hundreds of bots, these companies or individual sellers are able to accumulate unbelievable amounts of wealth.

 Screenshot of the IGE website, one of the most popular sites for this market for video game commodities

Although many gamers secretly purchase in-game advantages through these external sources (mostly so they can power up their character and advance faster than normal grinding), most players look down upon these "shortcuts" to fame and glory in the cyberworld. After all most online games are based on the power of characters. Whoever is stronger will be able to defeat others, just as the same in real life. The "real" route as intended by the developers of the online games is for one to grind endlessly until he or she has a strong character. In other words, whoever spends more time on the video game will ultimately be stronger. With the introduction of these gold sellers, now it turns into whoever has more money will be stronger. Most online game developers also dislike gold spammers because, evidently, these spammers are making real money off of their game without paying them a cent, since it is almost always free to create multiple characters from the same game account.

A complaint form to Game Moderators about gold spammers

Although it is definitely annoying to have spammers constantly advertising their services, I have to admit that making money off of simply playing a video game is ingenious. Although it's not exactly original since video game tournaments with prizes have existed for a long time, such as Starcraft tournaments, those tournaments are mostly based on skill, and not unlike a chess tournament. However selling in-game items is based purely on taking advantage of the intention of most players to get their characters stronger quicker than others, at little or no cost (cost of running computers such as electricity excluded). This type of gold selling was most prominent in Asian MMORPGs such as Aion: The Tower of Eternity (Korean: 아이온: 영원의 탑), Perfect World (Chinese: 完美世界), or Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (Chinese: 天龙八部), but have also spreaded to almost all free-to-play MMORPGs in the world.

Summarily, this is simply another business, and all businesses make money by taking advantage of consumer psychology and reducing costs to a minimum. This type of video game business does not offer a high rate of return (after all it's not too often to find someone who will spend several hundred dollars on in-game items), but has almost no cost associated. And this is all possible thanks to the cyberculture of online gaming, and gaming addiction.