Making Money from Online Game Currency

I found something important and I want to share it with the community, it's pretty big.

I've read a couple of threads over the past week about people wanting to sell online currency such as World of Warcraft gold. Early in this decade, there was some serious coin to be made as there was no real price or competition and the demand was obviously very high.

Then over the years competition began rising and, for one reason another, small companies based in China began dominating the industry. They became notorious for hiring young Chinese desperate for jobs and forcing them to sit at a computer and "farm" currency in various online games for astoundingly low wages. These low wages and fierce work ethic are most likely what lead to the Chinese domination of the industry. The industry brought in billions of dollars per year.

The rest of the world could not compete with China, and the online authorities in the video games could never assure they were banned (eventually giving up completely).

Until a couple of weeks ago.

(You don't need to read this long article, I will explain it) http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2009/06/29/china-cracks-down-on-virtual-currency-for-real/

Basically, China has outlawed the industry. There are more complexities, but all we need to know is they will no longer dominate. The industry may not dissipate completely but it will give us and other parts of the world a chance.

The method:

1. Research an online video game. Learn the fastest way to make their online currency in the game.

2. Purchase the game, and get to the point where you can "farm" as much currency as you can. Don't do it yet.

3. Repeat step 2 a lot with different accounts.

4. Begin making as much online currency as you can on 1 account, send the currency to another account at the end of the day. (THIS STEP CAN BE AUTOMATED)

5. If the account gets banned, it's ok. Your currency is sitting on another account which they will not ban because it looks like a legit account. Switch to another farming account.

6. Have your online website store setup. SEO. PPC. In-game advertisment. Whatever, you guys are professionals and getting traffic. Sell your currency to the gamers.

7. Profit.

If I have left anything out, let me know and I'll try and fix it. This is really off the top of my head here but I just wanted to let you know that China is leaving the market they were dominating.

Who's going to waste time getting money from a game, I mean, really?

Last time I played a game where people sold points for money was runescape. 1 Million GP was an almost impossible figure for me, and would take at least a month to get. Selling price? $20.

shadowpwner said:

Who's going to waste time getting money from a game, I mean, really?

Last time I played a game where people sold points for money was runescape. 1 Million GP was an almost impossible figure for me, and would take at least a month to get. Selling price? $20.

Click to expand...

Results 1 - 10 of about 30,100,000 for buy wow gold.

i've played runescape a while back, im talking years, i could make 1M gold in maybe a night of botting, so i didnt do anythiing, $20-40 for a night of leaving my PC on? easily earn loads of money from it, infact i've been planning to start earning from runescape for a while, shame i didnt start before, could earn loads now. google rsbot if you want to bot runescape, gilder for wow, if it's still around.

I thought about this awhile back since I loved playing World of Warcraft and all. Your method takes care of the ban-hammer pretty well, and you don't have to worry about IP ban if you use proxies or dial-up/DSL as far as I know. (as long as you switch everytime you make and log into an account) The only real problem I can find is that it may take awhile for anyone to be good enough to reap the rewards of getting an insane amount of gold to sell per day, and creating a lot of multiple accounts can be a bit much for some people that don't have a ton to invest.

However, I'd say if you're already raking in major profits and feel like doing some gaming and want to make some money out of it, then go for it. Nice idea!

the only way this works is if you outsource the work. Even with programs, it is difficult to match that of outsourcing, trust me. This comes from a 15 year old boy who plays many many online video games and used to market WoW and runescape gold.

(I'm using warcraft as the prime example here because it clearly dominates the market, however this will apply to all types of games).
Just because it's now formally illegal in china doesn't mean it's going to stop or the stores going to stop selling anytime soon. Not only that, but also it's by far not the only under developed country where people are eager to work for a few bucks a day.
You're missing so many vital parts in your main post you don't even realize - such as the point that if you are even CONSIDERING selling gold, there's no reason to bot yourself.. because there's no way in hell you're going to get more than $2 worth of gold an hour, this at level 80 with decent gear - which will have taken a significant period of time and money to get to.
If you already have a level 80 and want to farm gold.. Odds are you still wont earn minimum wage.

Personally I do have level 80's spread over a few accounts, and bot on them overnight (Pocketgnome for mac, wowmimic I believe is the most common PC bot). Even though these toons work nonstop for 6-10 hours a night, it's not even exceptional amounts that comes from it.

What I'm saying is: Unless you go really big, this aint worth it at all.
/2 cents

You'll never be able to compete on a cost basis with giant office complexes filled with chinese students. I'm well aware of game arbitrage, a friend of mine got out of EQ years ago and sold his maxed out account for like $4500.

I suspect if you broke this down into earnings per hour, you could make more at the drive thru at mcdonalds.

That may be true in the beginning Warbucks, although imagine if you had 500 WoW accounts going and collected 500G an hour per account, take your monthly expenses, the fact that 500 WoW gold cost ~$5.00, and you are making a HUGE profit.

It would only take lets say 50 high end PC's to run that many WoW games to.

It's a very "debatable" subject, and Glider is long gone, sued by Google and completely shut down.

That's reaching a bit high for 500 gold, but I'll play along - the problem again is that you cannot run these 500 accounts completely blindly. You'd have to ahve already run up 500 toons to 80 and prepared to get them to farm. Which servers? How would you manage it, you'd also have to sell / vendor / repair items individually (With a few exceptions) and then to make the gold actually sell the items you're farming.

Not possible or plausible by any stretch of the imagination.

You're on blackhatworld, there are millions of ideas that are far easier to make some money.

mooseweb said:

That may be true in the beginning Warbucks, although imagine if you had 500 WoW accounts going and collected 500G an hour per account, take your monthly expenses, the fact that 500 WoW gold cost ~$5.00, and you are making a HUGE profit.

It would only take lets say 50 high end PC's to run that many WoW games to.

It's a very "debatable" subject, and Glider is long gone, sued by Google and completely shut down.

Click to expand...

Even then it would not be worth it. Do you know how much WOW costs?

500 x $30 = $15,000
500 x $30 = $15,000
500 x $50 = $25,000
--------------------
= $55,000
Just to get all the accounts with the expansions.

Then its $500 x $15 ($7500) a month for being able to play. It also takes 1-2 months depending on the player to reach level 80. So you would possibly need to pay another $7500. Then you might even need another month to get fully geared up and everything. Even if its not a month. You still have to pay for one.

Then you can't have Glider running because as you said its being sued. Mind you I don't even think you would be able to run more than 5 copies of WOW at once on your computer let alone 500.

So you would need to outsource it. Even paying them $2-$3 an hour is destroying your profits to a small measly amount that could never pay back your investments.