Many people out there are familiar with the practice of MMORPG players selling gold to one another for real money. However, most people never would have guessed it could be a $1 billion industry!

Many massively multiplayer online role-playing games have become worlds in themselves.  Huge MMORPG’s like Eve and World of Warcraft have vast expanses of land to be explored and lots of bustling cities to be visited.  Millions of players populate these lands and cities and they even operate within economic systems setup by the game designers themselves.  These MMORPG’s have become so lifelike that the lines between the game world and the real world are starting to blur for some players.  And the practice of gold farming is definitely an indication of this.

Basically, gold farming is the process of repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again in order to get gold or items in the MMORPG.  This usually involves killing some creatures(s) over and over again to get the gold or items.  Taking gold farming a step further, some players even take these items or game money and transfer this stuff over to other people.  In exchange for doing this, the people will often pay these gold farmers real money for their services.

And just recently, a University of Manchester professor by the name of Richard Heeks sought to uncover just how much this little industry of gold farming was actually worth.  And the results he found proved that the industry isn’t quite so little after all.

Since Heeks couldn’t find one single piece of research into the subject of MMORPG gold farming, he had to basically produce the study on his own using online research, major sources like CBS, and MMORPG blogs like Play No Evil and TerraNova.  After doing quite a bit of work getting to the bottom of gold farming, Heeks was able to come up with some estimations in that gold farming employs over 400,000 people worldwide, 5 to 10 million customers are served through gold farming, and the industry hauls in at least $500 million to as much as $1 billion a year.

So where are all of these gold farmers coming from?  According to Heeks, they’re mostly based in East Asia with many hailing from China and Vietnam.  Richard Heeks also said that this large Asian majority of the 400,000 worldwide gold farmers only average around $145 a month doing this kind of work.  However, in some of these Asian areas, $145 can go a long way which is why people are willing to defy the MMORPG rules (which prohibits gold farming) and engage in the activity.

The reason that the game developers frown upon gold farming is because it leads to inflation within the online community.  With so much money floating around in the games, the items bought and sold lose much of their value.  Heeks even went as far as to make a comparison between the drug trade in real life and gold farming in MMORPG.  His research seems to have led him to become an opponent of gold farming in the end.

Heeks also admits that his research is only the beginning to uncovering more about gold farming and has called for more researchers to dive into the subject so that a more detailed study can be surmised.  Hopefully there are some others who will take him up on this challenge so that more can be learned about the gold farming process.