Professor Richard Heeks, head of the development informatics group at Manchester who wrote the report, said gold farming had become a significant economic sector in many developing nations.

“I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry,” said Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester who wrote the report.

“In a way that is still true. It’s just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands.”

Playing online games for 12 hours is a fulltime job for thousands of Chinese workers. They’re accumulating virtual money — or “gold” — which they can sell for real cash. But it’s a dull and labor-intensive job with limited payoffs.

According to the interview, there’s a gap between what you get paid if your farm gold in the US or in China. If you do it in China, you expect at most $4 for 12 hours of work. In the US, the same gold gets you $13. I’m not sure the economics work like that but that’s what they said.

So if you want to buy cheap WoW gold, go to Shanghai!

There’s also an HD version of it here.

Maybe someone could do a similar price comparison for powerleveling.

There will be four rankings to be attained:

• 0.0% – 0.5%: Gladiator (and Armored Nether Drake sent in mail)
• 0.5% – 3%: Duelist
• 3% – 10%: Rival
• 10% – 35%: Challenger

The rankings are per Battlegroup.

Blizzard has struck back recently – banning over 100,000 accounts and deleting 11 million gold (yes, that’s 11,000,000 of WoW gold). I imagine this means no more cheap wow gold for a month!

TechDirt are comparing this to the economy of Namibia:

There are also other problems with trying to count in-game economies — partly because they’re very much at the whim of the makers of various games. So, for example, when World of Warcraft makers Blizzard simply remove 11 million gold pieces from circulation, after shutting down accounts that made gold through fraud and cheats, how is that counted in the grand economic scheme?

What’s your take on this?

Game outsourcing has been here ever since Ultima Online came out more than a decade ago. Diablo 2 item trading was quite a big business but recently eBay banned the auctions of virtual goods.

BBC has an article on the implications of game outsourcing, here’s a few quotes:

Qin Shen, who works for a company called Ucdao.com, says: “Many white collar workers want to improve their character on their own, but they do not have much time. They need to go to work in the day and they don’t have the energy to improve at night, so they need someone else to play for them.”

But to say this is hugely controversial among the game’s community is putting it mildly. I posted a message on one website asking for people who buy gold to get in touch – and got a number of quite hostile responses.

Eventually, I did find someone who had bought gold.

“I have a life outside of the game that’s certainly much more important, so the few precious hours I do get to play on my game I don’t want to spend doing the same thing over and over again to get in-game money, when I could just buy that and do the stuff in-game that I actually enjoy,” he said.

That’s about three times faster than it took me to level my main character – a hunter.

I wonder if it works if you’re level 70. I bet it doesn’t!