Blizzard should be ashamed 5
Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.
Blizzard should be ashamed.
We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.
However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.
Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.
If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.
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Or exchanging anything other than time for useful in-game items is against their philosophy.
Perhaps, but my point is, this is a lousy philosophy both from an economical point of view, and more importantly, from a business point of view.
Is it really wasted if someone is trying to make a living from doing it? If the job of gold farming was taken away from the people doing it, would they be able to earn money somewhere else? While it’s a shitty job and extremely badly paid, it may be a lot better to the alternatives available to them.
Except your entire theory is flawed. Find a “free-to-play” game, a game that sells gold or items for money that is as well designed as subscription games. Keep looking, you won’t find one.
The reason is that players invest in their characters. If you can just buy the items that they invested time to receive then your game is no longer a game. It’s a competition of who has the most real world money.
Blizzard is 100% on the right track. Ban the gold sellers who undermine their game.
”. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining.”
Um… it’s not a waste of time just because they’re making money. ALL of the video game industry is dedicated to wasting time, and the rich Europeans/Americans playing for their own entertainment are the most wasteful.
But.. at least they’re not thinking about sports. That’s probably societys #1 waste of effort, and it’s sad that people are starving, whales are dying and kids are being neglected while morons funnel tons of energy and time into football.