I am researching people who actually make a living - or at least money - by PLAYING computer games. Including:
I am sure I read about some guy who gave up his job because he was making so much money inside a game making virtual weapons or equipment, and selling it for real money. If anyone can find a link to this I would be really grateful.
Many thanks for anyone who can help.
Hope this is the sort of thing you’re after
I actually considered trying this out back when I was into EverQuest; I did a business plan to determine if I could make a living selling items, GP, and characters.
After considerable study I determined the per-hour return was too low and the risk too high as compared to my day job - if I hadn’t has a good a job, though, it might have been worth it. (And EverQuest has historically experienced high inflation.) But it CAN be done, if you’re sufficiently dedicated and alerady have a good base of in-game income.
Thanks everyone! That is the exact story I was trying to find. And the other information is really useful. RickJay would it be OK if I possibly quote you for my article, just what you said above? I can keep you anonymous.
Thanks everyone! That is the exact story I was trying to find. And the other information is really useful. RickJay would it be OK if I possibly quote you for my article, just what you said above? I can keep you anonymous.
Do you have access to Factiva? (It’s a newspaper searching service. Most libraries have access to it). Do a Factiva search for:
Everquest and Ultima and Mexico
There’s a good article about the gaming economy. One thing interesting I read there was that a guy opened an office in Mexico where he paid people to play Ultima so he could sell their winnings on eBay.
There are also Pro gaming leagues where winners win huge bounties; supposedly, a talented gamer can earn 100k or more a year. I think the leagues are called OGL or CPL or something like that. The popular games for competition in America and Europe seem to be FPS games like Quake or Counterstrike.
In Korea however, there is a phenomenon of Starcraft fever that is baffling. Entire stadiums fill up with fans just to see two players fight it out in this game.The players have throngs of fans and even groupies. They are treated as celebrities and rock stars. And yes, they make tons of cash.
I did it for Anarchy Online and Shadowbane. The market isn’t so great anymore since the stock market bubble burst. I made about $3000 in running virtual guns in Anarchy Online in a month and $1000 in Shadowbane in the same amount of time. I didn’t do it for the money; I did it because it was fun.
Anarchy Online was the best because there were only 2 main servers and there was a global trade chat.
I had about 5 people looking for items for me in the trade zones and I’d pay them with ingame currency. I would often buy a certain amount of ingame currency on Ebay and then use that currency to buy items that I could then sell for 20 times the amount I spent on the currency. I could sell a pair of fricking guns for $125 at the peak. Mind you this is a gun which would be obsolete for the player in a couple of weeks. I definately made more money than anyone else for the time I put into it. I didn’t sell currency that much because I never got my characters very high to be able to get large amounts of currency plus it paid a low hourly rate and like I said you could arbitrage currency against items anyway. If someone marketed a character poorly on Ebay and it wasn’t selling, I would buy it, write it up better, and sell it for three times the price. I also bought characters, stripped them, sold the loot for 10 times what I paid for the characters. I even sold fashion items that had offered no benefits to the character stats at all. People would buy dresses that really weren’t hard to find for $25. In one instance, I corresponded with a woman (I still have the emails) who had bid on a dress and when the she won the auction she sent me her mailing address. She thought the screenshot was like a representative picture;of course, she never questioned why the auction title was “ANARCHY ONLINE RED KUNG FU DRESS SERVER 1.”
The most money was made by finding a client who always wanted stuff and dealing directly with them. You would sell them something off Ebay and then ask if they were looking for something else; invariably they were.
Thanks again guys! Sadly I don’t have access to Factiva. Kid: would it be OK if I quoted you or at least mentioned the details of your situation as a real life example?
Sure, what’s it for?
It’s for an article I am writing for a Dubai magazine on people who make a living (or at least some money!) playing computer games. Let me know if there is a specific alias/fake name you would like to be called! (Eg: “Bill, a gamer from the US,” etc).