
In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry - rms
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7575902.stm
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josefresco
"true size of the sector was hard to estimate - it could easily be twice as
big"

Or half as big. The article and study aren't convincing.

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baha_man
Link to the report:

Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World
Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games

[http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/w...](http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/di_wp32.htm)

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kajecounterhack
The only thing I fear is the health of those poor chinese workers' eyes...not
to mention their overall well-being.

They might be better off doing labor work and going gold-farming only when
they're too old to do labor.

Thats not to say I'm happy that they're stuck with these options, I'm chinese
also and I feel for the 240 million impoverished Chinese....

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daniel-cussen
I've read that gold farmers usually spend their spare time playing even more
WoW.

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gruseom
I've read that too. James Fallows has an interesting piece about these and
other workers who populate the factory-dormitory world in China. A lot of us
assume they're being exploited, but Fallows argues that they're more
entrepreneurial than that. They can save enough money in a few years to go
back home and buy land, something which wouldn't have been possible before. It
would be interesting to know how many actually do this.

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eru
Sometimes it's better to be exploited.

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gojomo
On the one hand, it's great people who need the money have this as an option.

On the other hand, the system owners could undercut any price by selling
resources created by fiat, with a few keystrokes. So in a sense, all this
activity is burning away hours -- human potential -- in an inefficient process
someone else could do effortlessly. And, the whole market exists only as long
as the system owners won't deign to offer such services directly.

So I can't quite decide if the whole phenomenon is encouraging or
discouraging.

