Home » Site News » The Business of Gold Selling: MMORPG Black Market
Any MMORPG with a ton of players is going to have players who want power and money, fast. It creates a demand for a product, as illegal as it may be to trade Cabal Alz the way they are being traded.
And where there is a demand for a product, there is someone who will supply it... for a price, of course. And to speed up the process and make the service cheaper so it sells more often, programs are created to make the gold efficiently, and it can be run on multiple IPs, multiplying the availability of the product by however many programs they can run.
All sorts of products can be farmed; items, experience, and gold for instance. Even though this service is 100% illegal, since to gain rights to playing the game the farmers had to agree to the terms (Which every big time game will include the rule that no outside programs that modify the game may be used), small "businesses" can still get away with it.
One game where I see this business flourish is Mabinogi and has inspired me to write this.
What does gold selling do to the game? First off, it imbalances a game's economy. Let me talk about how MMORPG economies work for a bit.
When developers make a game, they decide how money will be given to players, and how much money will be destroyed (EX: Selling items to NPC vendors or using their services).