World of Warcraft Gold Studio-the financial empire of virtual worlds

With the number of players in online games like World of Warcraft breaking through millions, a new service industry has emerged.　　Players known as "gold Farmer" hoard the money in the game and sell it to other players to benefit.　　This controversial approach violates the rules of the game, but allows millions of developing world players to earn almost as much as industrial workers. How can you turn virtual gold coins into real money? That sounds like a question the digital alchemist asked. However, a large number of "gold farmer" in developing countries have found the answer, becoming entrepreneurs who make a living from online gaming. In these games they specialize in killing monsters, mining, or engaging in other activities to obtain "virtual gold coins" and then selling them to other players (usually in the rich world) in exchange for real money.　　Although this violates the rules of the game, the two sides of the virtual currency depend on these coins to determine the fate of the virtual characters in the game. In Asia, a skilled gold player earns money by playing games, selling virtual money, and a common worker who works 12 hours a day-sometimes even more.　　So over the past 10 years, gold has become an ingenious and controversial activity, in this way, people in poorer countries can earn money from information and communication technologies, and poor workers can hone digital technology, perhaps in the future in the field of information technology and other types of work unrelated to the game. In a few short years, gold has developed into a huge industry. According to one of the most assured estimates, in Asia, the number of players who earn money in online games is more than 400,000, and virtual gold coins are worth more than 1 billion dollars a year.　　Around 10 million players worldwide have bought coins or services that make their virtual characters more powerful in the game. The gold industry, once detached from the sight of gamers, has attracted a lot of attention from economists and sociologists and is seen as the intersection of the poor and the rich, the real and the virtual. In recent years, academia and the mass media have been interested in the game model, because each game contains a small world that runs fast forward--here, the fate of individual and group players will fluctuate in days or weeks, and the ups and downs of ordinary life or the whole of society will take decades, even centuries. My interest in playing gold is the result of a virtual gold dealer who encounters a network game.　　The relationship between this activity and my major--global development--has led me to a new research direction that allows me to explore the social and economic characteristics of gold-playing behavior. Gold industry in the operation of gold is prevalent in the World of Warcraft (World of Warcraft), "Endless Task Ⅱ" (Everquestⅱ) and other large multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). These games create a virtual world for players on the screen, the world not only houses, landscapes, including Dwarves and Giants.Fantasy characters, and virtual economy. Depending on the game settings, players can buy armor weapons, food drugs, faster mounts, and better spacecraft with virtual gold coins. By mining, logging, or killing monsters and other enemies, players can accumulate their own gold coins. Like the real world, getting rich can be a tedious process that may take weeks or months. As a result, many players in the real world who have wealth have gone the other way-to hire people to do the work.　　This is just like hiring people to clean their houses or clean their cars, but instead of working as a domestic worker.　　A category of people nicknamed "play Nuggets", they are in the online game collection can buy weapons and equipment of the "gold", which profits, they are generally from Asia, the number of thousands. After hoarding large amounts of money, the gold-picker usually picks one of the thousands of websites that sell virtual equipment, selling virtual wealth and exchanging real money. Trading is done via PayPal or other online payment tools, a bit like buying forex in a virtual world.　　With the largest number of registered World of Warcraft as an example, in the United States, the retail price of 1,000 gold coins is 10 U.S. dollars, and the yen against the U.S. dollar exchange rate. Once the payment is made in real currency, the buyer and seller will deliver the virtual gold coins at a rendezvous in the virtual world. Most of the money earned comes from sales of gold coins, as well as the "acting" service, which creates a more advanced role in health, power, and technology for clients ' low-level gamers. The cost of rising from level 1 to level 50 in Lord of the Rings Online game is about 150 dollars. Sometimes, the gold player does not play the role of the client directly, but guards the player to complete a dangerous or difficult task--like hiring a sherpa to help you climb Himalaya Mountain. [Page] The prehistoric era of the virtual economy to play online games, the first need to buy a point card, this fee is the game company to collect, and players in the purchase of virtual gold coins about half of the cost of buying a point card. How did it come to this?　　In my study, I found that the development of gold industry is very similar to the real world economic development, both from the beginning of the barter, and eventually developed into a complex global trading network. The mud (Multi-User dungeon, multi-user adventure game), which was born in the University of Essex in 1978, could be called the first MMORPG in history. As an important pioneer of modern online gaming, the initial mud and early games of the same kind allow multiple users to congregate in the same online world, but here, characters, players, and objects are all delivered in words. In the eyes of economic development, mud players represent the self-sufficient farmers of the former industrial society.　　The player's production and consumption are for themselves. As in the real-life community, people start trading for precious game items. If I had an extra amber,Chain, and you have the extra sword, and we can arrange an exchange. (it is said that there are also male players giving female players a rare game prop to get emotional or physical rewards, but the expectation is mostly dashed.) Gradually, equipment exchange began to include the use of gold coins to change equipment. By the 1980s some time, the exchange of real currency and game currency appeared. Players are starting to exchange cash for equipment.　　In economic terms, virtual goods are "monetization"; today, people use "real money Trading" (Real-money trading,rmt) to refer to the substitution of cash for virtual currencies, goods and services. Virtual Equipment's real money deals slowed in the Eighties or Nineties of the 20th century. The players might have been called "the gardener of the coin market". They pelting just got out of the bargain, selling virtual gold coins as a sideline, like industrial workers planting vegetables in their backyard to earn extra money. This group of players focus on the game's entertainment function.　　Even today, in Indian and Indonesian internet cafes, there are part-time players who sell extra equipment or people to earn some pocket money. The two events of 1997 have opened up a new phase of the virtual industry. The first is the launch of the network Genesis (Ultima online), which is the first real big online game, followed by ebay, which provides a shortcut to equipment trading. The gardeners of the gold coin market have come to understand that they can earn more than just a few dispensable pocket money. They began to concentrate on acquiring game equipment and game money for sale, and some even quit their jobs and obsessed to earn virtual gold coins. These players are mainly located in Western countries, they become the first batch of real gold players. Their behavior is equivalent to an individual mechanic or factory-style production model.　　Every time a new game comes online, money, weapons or other items are put on ebay for sale in a matter of weeks. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 laid the foundation for the current gold-playing industry. Asian governments have increased their investment in information and communication technologies, including broadband technology, in the hope of escaping the crisis through consumption. Some unemployed people embarked on the road of entrepreneurship, such as the opening of Internet cafes, which promoted the strong game culture in East Asia. [Page] The Golden Age of Gold by 2001, some of the more entrepreneurial American gold-seekers began recruiting friends and even hired employees to make money in the industry. Emerging American gold-seekers (often relatives outside the United States) look farther afield, seeing low-cost regions such as Latin America and Asia. At the same time, South Koreans began to transform internet cafes into gold-lineage, specializing in the medieval fantasy game "paradise", which is the first MMORPG from non-Western countries.　　Gold players soon began selling game coins called "Adena" to other players. As coin trading companies are growing in the US and Asia, they are starting to use outsourced operations to save money by following companies like Wal-Mart. They naturally thought of yaContinent, the world's gold industry is gathering in the thought of ready-made, low-cost labour reserves, which are skilled or easily trained, and the increasingly sophisticated broadband facilities there. 2004, "World of Warcraft" online, the game became the most successful MMORPG, but also to play gold industry has brought brilliant.　　By 2010, 11 million players had been registered as "World of Warcraft" to take a risk in Azeroth, the fantasy worlds. Like agriculture or manufacturing in all developed industrial societies, gold majors are increasingly developing into specialization. Several players from the same gold-playing company often play different roles in the same game: Hunters are responsible for hunting monsters; Bankers are responsible for storing assets and transporting them from one place to another; In addition, independent traders have begun to earn money by employing players who are not directly involved in the game. They started buying and selling roles or game equipment like Wall Street financial instruments.　　A trader buys an account that is associated with a particular role and then hires a gold player and sells it to interested players to benefit from it. Around 2005, a gold-mining crisis formed as the global housing and financial bubble emerged. The online gaming entertainment company (Internet Gaming entertainment,ige), as an intermediary between Oriental gold and Western players, earns 10 million ~2,000 dollars a month and pays millions of dollars to the top. It is said that a Chinese dozen gold in two years time of 1.3 million dollars. Personal equipment is priced at $20,000. But from 2005 to 2009, the price of virtual money fell by 85%. Research by the Center for Development Informatics at Manchester University, UK, shows that too many entrepreneurs enter the market and lead to the fragmentation of the gold coin bubble. Gold is still booming, but in recent years the industry has begun to move into lower-cost areas, and some new Vietnamese companies have emerged. (Edit/Zhang Lei)