I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.
The irony is staggering.
The irony is staggering.
Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).
The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome.
I was an original beta player for UO and we had a fantastic run exploiting bugs and high speed Internet connections from the Intel game lab we ran, with multiple accounts to dominate and reach wealth and fame.
It was my golden years of gaming actually. Now I may play an hour or two of skyrim a week if I am lucky.
Back then I was making nearly nearly 70k to play UO from a sick lab 12+hours a day.
From one point of view, sure. It really is a bummer to the player experience since the reality of it is that a company can and will protect itself better than it's users in aggregate will protect themselves, so you just end up with the current WoW situation of a huge stream of hacked accounts draining resources of the game company and destroying the play experience of the players. I'm not sure where any of this is wonderful, really. It isn't like the myth of the gold farmer where they hire out warehouses of employees to play the game building up "new gold" in the player economy, it's just key loggers and trojans and ten million potential victims.
Generally speaking expect a 30% pay cut compared to a non-games programmer (varying on what kind of games, zynga-style stuff is highly payed IIRC).
Isn't that what EVE did? (Also, you might want to read Stephenson's latest novel, Reamde, for an exploration of a game company that did just that.)
http://www.freakonomics.com/2007/10/17/the-absolute-poker-ch...
I realize it's not the same but it's in the same vein: engineers with an upper hand beating the in-game economy.
In almost all cases, it has meant a higher amount of revenue, either for brand-new games or for games which transition to the F2P model or an in-between hybrid model. It looks like, generally, big-name MMORPGs are still starting out with a subscription model, but most games at other tiers are launching free-to-play with an item shop. Lots of long-running MMOs are transitioning to a hybrid model to add revenue to a product from which little is expected but also little is being spent on (just enough money to keep the servers running and keep a slow flow of updates).
I think it would be much harder these days for a player to make money by through farming, except for with the old guard of MMORPGs which still don't have an item shop. I could be wrong, I am not looking at these economies closely so I don't know if the farmers are actually able to provide items / prices competitive with the developrs.
Every gold farmer was competing on price with someone who had INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; available to them and the manual labor was winning.
There were many folks who said that there were solid commercial reasons for this refusal at the time. A lot of them boiled down to "I don't know about those crazy Asians but sophisticated American consumers don't want to do this thing that we're spending thousands of man-hours a month unsuccessfully trying to prevent Americans from doing." Those have been pretty decisively proven wrong since a) when AAA US MMORPGs experiment with item sales they make serious bank and b) the Free2Play model empirically has worked very, very well in the US, especially when you compare the revenue per user and in aggregate against the HUGE premium embedded in development costs of the AAA subscription RPGs.
Oh, also, Zynga ROFLstomped the entire industry. (10~50% of the revenues of the most successful MMORPGs for 2~3% of the development costs of the median AAA MMORPG... and they did it more times in a three year period than there have been successful AAA MMORPGs in history.)
Also, zynga is an idea thieving bandit of a company - so their costs are also far lower due to their hiring people that can copy as opposed to the thought leaders who would have come up with original content.
But if the only metric you choose to measure them on is revenue to expense, then by that myopic unethical lens - sure they look good.
This doesnt mean they dont have their own infrastructure - but it is different than an MMO company like SWG/WOW that have their own infrastructure for 100% of the game.
The point made was that Zynga is doing what MMOs do at far lower cost. I said the cost was offset because Facebook foots the bill for the platform on which Zynga depends.
They are facebook's largest advertiser, IIRC. Additionally, I believe facebook has invested in zynga, so the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic. I am anti-zynga, but its important to be accurate in our critiques.
I believe Zynga provides more of Facebook's profits than any other company.
Zynga could easily argue that Facebook is a parasite by profiting from all the people who want to play Zynga's games.
It's also a really quick read for a Stephenson book.
Play Money is a fantastic non-fiction account of online gaming economies if anyone wants a more extensive non-fiction treatment of the topic.
But I can also understand the resistance to it. I only just started playing my first MMORPG (SW:TOR), and as a player I think it would bother me if they openly sold advancement to the people that would be in the PVP matches with me. I know a certain amount in the background is unavoidable, but that is fair easier to tolerate than having the company sanction much less be involved in it.
So, if the amount of money they would gain from the purchasers exceeds the amount they would lose from people with my opinions dropping the game, then from a business perspective they should do it, but it comes at a cost. Of course the middle ground is to do it on some servers and consider outside purchases cheating on other servers, but even that might turn off some potential players that see it as distasteful.
The f2p model was tested with a lot of other games, both in China and Korea. I think gunz online was one of them.
Anyhoo - the major American brands resisted because of the cultural idea behind an MMO of the time - as in a world, which you subscribed to be in, and act within.
Being able to pay money to advance faster than other people broke the golden rule of immersion the original founders/artists had in mind.
Dont forget, this is now a bygone age of gaming - where people created games as an extension of their imagination and a hope to enact cool things in character.
Today those drives are still there, but completely leashed to the need to ensure profitability.
Its led to more attempts and games, but you now don't have things like sprawling empty wastelands in the barrens of WoW. Every square inch has been maximized to ensure that it has no dead spaces, or environments which let people advance at anything beyond the average rate decided by the designers.
Most designers for MMOs will avoid selling advancement enhancing goods - it destroys the game in the long run.
The model they use is one where if you aren't paying, you are the content. They need to make sure it is egalitarian at a gameplay level.
Beyond that, its free for monetization.
The costs of these items or services in game helps to establish the value of what is traded among players, either directly or through an auction house.
They design these things into the game [i] on purpose [/i]
The economics of video games, in terms of GDP is simple - people constantly produce thing from a never ending well of digital resource nodes.
As a result of crafting + drop + trash sales, total gold in the servers always goes up, causing unending price inflation.
Its a pretty cool example of what would happen in a world with plenty.
Game designers create gold sinks to give people - especially the stupidly rich - something to dump their gold into.
I've been on the wow servers soon after vanilla launched - some gamers (and some human beings in general) are just wired to enjoy amassing wealth and gaming the economy.
These sinks were created to ensure that those players end up doing minimal damage to the average player.