Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
General: The Return of Miscellany
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
MMORPG.com columnist Richard Aihoshi has been out scouring the Internet for all the most compelling information about the free-to-play MMOG market. This week, Richard has several interesting tidbits of news to share to keep reading. Be sure to leave a comment or two when finished!
As anyone who reads The Free Zone at least semi-regularly can attest, there are times when my mind focuses in on a single topic, and others when my attention wanders around more. The past week has been one of the latter, but upon a bit of reflection, these three things did stand out at least a little above the rest.
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: The Return of Miscellany.
)
Comments
You have to be kind of stupid to buy gold in the first place, but what kind of short-bus fool would buy pre-order gold? It's impossible to know, or even make an educated guess at, what the relative value of the in-game currency will be. Setting a dollar price for it would be the height of arbitrary.
I hope this means that gold-selling scum are getting desperate because their gold-buying scum clientele are starting to disappear. Hope springs eternal...
Lazy people is Lazy.
It's the nature of the game, where you have to not only pay money to the people providing the game, but to people that have no other way to make money, but sell fools gold!
3.53 billion means its around 24 - 25 billion YUAN. Which is the reason Chinese love suckering americans and europeans. They take advantage of the worth of European and American Currency vs their own....
Chinese have reason to scam and make crappy games to take money from people and its because its worth is so good that a Chinese can leave an automated system up all night with minimum number of people in one month have enough YUAN to live the same life for 100 years.
Charge $10 a month per player. 1000 players...You have 10,000 a month, 120,000 a year which is around 784K Yuan. Remember it costs around 400 - 500 YUAN a month to pay rent over there and the cost of food and clothing is cheap in China. Nothing like a great scam right? And the funny part is that Americans fall for it each and every time.
Welcome to the wonderful world of (virtual) gold futures...
Is it really surprising that there is a growing trade in (virtual) commodities?
As I recall over a year ago an interview with one of the heads at bioware asked about combatting gold farming to which they got a mysterious reply that made me think that maybe their idea to combat it will be to sell currency themselves at below gold farmer price.
I mean such a solution sucks in one sense as a player I dont want to buy currency or want others to have that advantage, however with gold farmers players prepared to pay cash for game currency already do have that advantage despite my loathing if that practice. So perhaps it is better for game makers to sell currency below gold farmer price to simply drive them out of the game in question and stop them from being an in game irritation.
I've not seen the report, but the wording would indicate that the $3.53billion is from the domestic market. Which means it excludes any money those companies made from North America or Europe.
It also means that Tencent is the fifth company in the entire world to make over $1 billion in a single year from MMO revenue. And only one of those five companies has managed to sustain that revenue for more than a single year (Blizzard).
Totally agree though about the currency thing, gold farming is big business in China because it brings such a huge return on investment once coverted to the local currency. It is also the reason that most of the large Chinese RMT companies are operated by criminal organisations.
Though we should not forget though that gold farming was invented in America and the majority of gold farming companies remain American, even if they employ workers from other countries.
LOL, I'm just waiting for the Bonds and Future Shares market to be able to retire
Gold farming = not cool
People buy gold for various reasons, not because they're stupid or lazy. Although stupidity and laziness does account for some of the players, you have to also consider external factors that prohibits the single player from investing as much time/effort into the game to accumulate wealth. Not only that, not all players revolve around internal wealth within a game; but like everyone else, they have wants. So how do you obtain those wants without hoarding gold? You buy it. I don't consider buying gold any different than purchasing DLC through the publisher, although I consider it riskier. It would be a better system if the publisher sold gold instead of creating an outlet for scammers and bot farmers, but I don't consider the people who purchase the gold to be trash because their perspective on buying gold is different than your own.