A snapshot of today's gold-selling/power-leveling market
by Michael Zenke 
Dec 26th 2007 at 3:00PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, MapleStory, Business models, Economy, Exploits, Game mechanics, Runescape, Academic
GameSetWatch, the alt.blog on CMP's Gamasutra network of sites, has up a discussion with a gold-farming boss. "Mr. Smith" is one of the owners of a gold-selling site, and submitted an article looking at the current state of the virtual currency market - from his perspective. Smith makes two interesting points in his discussion: that power-leveling is now the 'growth industry' for RMT services, and that the newest workforce in the marketplace is ... wait for it ... North Korea.
The cost of these power-leveling services has also dipped considerably as new players enter the marketplace. Competitive pressure has dropped the price from about $6/level to more like $2.50/level in World of Warcraft. All 70 levels now averages about $250, down from a high of almost $500.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Arabica said on 5:08PM 12-26-2007
He really doesn't seem all that concerned about having accounts banned or items/currency stripped from accounts. I guess that when the labor is cheap enough and the cash coming in is sufficient then it really doesn't matter except for the purchaser who might have to wait an extra week or two.
WoW has done an amazing job combating farmers, but it's still disconcerting to read that the pros really don't care about getting banned. In Lineage2 farmers walk around with impunity so I expect that attitude there. In WoW though? Weird.
It will be interesting to see how the next generation of MMO's either combat or embrace RMT.
Reply
Green Armadillo said on 6:09PM 12-26-2007
Getting banned is a necessary cost of doing business for farmers... though one would think it's a much bigger issue for power-levelers, since that's your customers' account that just got banned. The fact that he can refer to it as a risk management issue when some of his customers now have NO characters instead of the level 70 characters they paid him to level for them for only serves to underscore how shady the RMT business is at the moment.
P.S. Dear GameSetWatch, way to run an un-paid advertisement for this dude's RMT site. You could have at least scrubbed the URL.