Gaming's little dirty secret

Mar 26, 2009 12:34 GMT  ·  By

All successful MMOs face the problem of gold trading at one point. Players looking to get ahead without putting in the time get in game currency from other players, spending it on epic mounts, better equipment or better skills.

There's a parallel industry centered on gold farming, which is illegal, if you ask any MMO developer. There are accounts banned left and right in World of Warcraft or in Warhammer Online because of gold trading, yet it seems that the practice is not becoming less popular.

Extreme Gamer, an anonymous gamer who runs WoW Gold Facts, a Real Money Trading review site, says that no less than 30% of MMO players are actively engaged in buying or selling gold. He is quoted in a new feature about RMT for Eurogamer stating that, in his opinion, publishers and developers are underestimating the importance of the problem and failing to act in a coherent way to tackle it.

Extreme Gamer says that “the industry would be better served if publishers would recognise that lots of gamers – I've heard it's 30 per cent of the player base – like the benefits of RMT, and work with credible companies and allow it to happen. I don't see why this is not possible. They could make a condition of involvement in RMT that players give them a complete release of all forms of liability.”

It is estimated that the Real Money Trading market is above 2 billion dollars at the moment and it will probably grow in the coming years, as the future of the PC is becoming more and more tied to the MMO market and as they become popular on gaming consoles.

If developers create an official market in which players can buy in game currency legally and in a supervised manner, a lot of problems caused by RMT would disappear. On the flipside, such a move would generate an outcry from players who would say that gold selling and buying would generate unfair advantages for some MMO players.