Finances of Multiplayer Online Video Games

hejustlaughs said: Online games are generally time sinks. You play them to kill time. The people making the money in online games are the developers of the games.

Nah you can make pretty good money automating them and selling in game items and currency.

tripleB said: Share your tips and tricks.

Be a Chinese gold farmer. I heard they make good money.

TxAggieJen said: Second Life went in the crapper as far as money-making is concerned when they got rid of the gambling. It was a fun place to spend a few hours on a Saturday night when gambling was allowed. People made money in the gambling, then spent it buying fake clothes and whatnot for their characters. You could make some cash selling digital artwork and furniture that people used to decorate their digital homes. Ahh, the memories.

I used to make money on second life playing tringo. A game. But I swore off the online games, in favor of reality.

I play eve online. Very enjoyable, and if you make enough in-game money, you can use it to pay for the suscription, making it a free game.

I traded a advanced imperial dreadnought cruiser for a 1972 ford mustang mach 1(the real car) a couple of years ago.

So yea, I guess there are people out there that will pay real for imaginary.

theboogeyman said: Be a Chinese gold farmer. I heard the]y make good money.
They figured out how to grow gold on their farms? Shit! I knew the technology was close, but I didn't think the Chinese would get it first. How do I get involved in this endeavor? I have 60 acres of prime farming land.

Thanks in advance!

IRC is multiplayer notepad.

I've made well over 100K Gold in WoW. You've got to have money to make money. Get a sizable pot (50-100G) then invest it.

FYI, I spend about 30 minutes a day in the game. 10 in the morning, and 20 at night.

Dazarath said: chimeer said: Nah you can make pretty good money automating them and selling in game items and currency.

While it's true that you can make some money running bots, the associated cost is not 0. There's a cost for the software, whether you develop it yourself or you purchase it. You'd also have to estimate how long on average you can run the software before your account gets banned. Or a better measurement may be your average return per account you purchase. Then there's the obvious computer/internet costs. Etc etc.

To TripleB: As interesting as I find the gold farming market, it should be pretty obvious that any well-known market with zero barriers to entry will become saturated very quickly. And when your competition is people from other countries willing to work for significantly less than US minimum wage, you'd probably be better off working at McDonalds. Just my $0.02.

Your .02 is exactly what the Chinese gold farmers make per hour. The owners make more, but I heard they pay their "employees" next to nothing (even for Chinese standards).

Like I said, I do not play anymore, but I always wondered how these farmers worked.

I know the basics... You either automate it so that a character automatically does something in game that makes money or you have a person repeat the same, but they actually do it.

I guess my wonder was, where do they do it? If they can farm so much gold, why not just do what they are doing and load up on gold.

When I was playing, I would have been happy to take over their area or help them get some gold (for my character).
I know that people used to send a message to the ones they suspected were farming, and report the ones that would not respond or just said "hi" or something like that.

I tried to link my all powerful hunter, but WOW Armory said it could not display since it had been so long since I last played.

I played Ultima Online for about a year, and was able to generate enough gold by running a shop to pay for my subscription and the software costs.

It did take a chunk of time to keep up my stock of regs, but since I enjoyed the time running a virtual store, I didn't mind. It also provided gold to buy nicer equipment for my other characters.

Back in the day I spent countless hours playing UO. Thank God UO:R came out and I quit so I could actually develop a social life.

EverCrack used to be king of 'making money playing online games', especially before the eBay crackdowns. When you can pay your rent and more by power-gaming, bot-ing the rest of the time and selling the results.......wow. It took a certain type of player/hustler to succeed at that, but not as much as now. I don't think the ease of those days are ever coming back.

I'm kinda glad.

see also: pager text sex operators. yeah, the nigerians and eastern euros are creating their own extremely lucrative niche of fleecing Western lonely hearts, but at least the pager text sex operators were operating legally (mostly, excluding the credit card scammers) while raking in the Big Dough.

Nonaii said: EverCrack used to be king of 'making money playing online games', especially before the eBay crackdowns. When you can pay your rent and more by power-gaming, bot-ing the rest of the time and selling the results.......wow. It took a certain type of player/hustler to succeed at that, but not as much as now. I don't think the ease of those days are ever coming back.

I'm kinda glad.

I made decent money on everquest at the end. Well not really, but I made all my money back for the years of playing by selling my account and plat on my account. I could of very easily made money if I knew about selling stuff on eBay. I farmed the heck out of a lot of stuff for no reason but to give it away. I had almost a daily farm on a few of the major farming things back int he day. I did tons of Lodi camps just to give the shield away to guildmates.