

100,000 Chinese are full-time professional video game gold-farmers - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/technology/09gaming.html?ex=1291784400&en=a723d0f8592dff2e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

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cstejerean
If people are willing to pay for a higher level avatar, etc, I wonder why
Blizzard doesn't just allow one to purchase that directly from them. Virtual
worlds are one place where actually putting time in to do "work" is only
required if the owners of the world decide to require it.

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pmjordan
There seem to be two MMO models, the subscription model and the subscription-
free model where you pay for better gear. I don't know if there are any hybrid
games (I don't play any MMOs myself) but I could imagine that once the premium
practice was legitimised, people would get upset about having to pay for the
subscription.

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Retric
You can sell time cards for in game cash in eve online. You can also trade
charters between accounts in eve.

At the same time there seems to be a lot of gold farmers in the game.

I think everquest opened a server where you could buy cash but there are few
high end items you can get by spending gold in that game.

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ilamont
This trend has been going on for some time:

[http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/nytimes_tracks...](http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/nytimes_tracks_.html)

What I think is really interesting about WoW is that unlike practically every
other MMORPG, the number of subscribers continues to rise after four years on
the market. The usual pattern is to peak after a year or two, and then
gradually fade:

<http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html>

I wonder about the role of expansion packs in this phenomenon, and whether
other types of gaming or software products could follow a similar model,
instead of complete product replacements to new versions.

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pmjordan
Interesting graph. (although someone needs to be introduced to the concept of
a logarithmic scale)

I found it particularly intriguing that (as far as I can make out) at no point
in time did Everquest 2 have more subscribers than Everquest, and the same is
true for Lineage 2 and Lineage. I wonder if that's one of the reasons Blizzard
are continually upgrading the existing game rather than releasing a
replacement?

As for other software: well, I think a lot of subscription-based and/or web-
based software already does this. You don't choose to switch to GMail 2.0,
it's just a steady trickle of new stuff.

Conventional games on the other hand are very hit-driven - they don't peak
after a year or two but within the first few weeks, after which they fall off
more or less exponentially. They do release expansions for many games of
course, although I think it depends heavily on the game how well that sells.
(the famous extreme example is of course Railroad Tycoon 2, where the
expansion sold more copies than the base game due to piracy)

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gaius
That's a staggering number; it's larger than the current British Army.

