Poor earning virtual gaming gold

Many online games have tried to tackle the trade in game gold

Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found.

Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly.

The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn £77 per month on average.

The practice is flourishing despite efforts by games companies to crack down on the trade in virtual goods.

Big industry

Professor Richard Heeks, head of the development informatics group at Manchester who wrote the report, said gold farming had become a significant economic sector in many developing nations.

"I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry," said Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester who wrote the report.

"In a way that is still true. It's just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands."

In many online games virtual cash remains rare and many people turn to suppliers such as gold farmers to get money to outfit avatars with better gear, weapons or a mount.

Many gold farmers focus on World of Warcraft

Some gold-farming operations offer other services such as "power levelling" in which they assume control of a player's character and turn it into a high-powered hero far faster than the original owner could manage themselves.

Prof Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m.

But, he said, the true size of the sector was hard to estimate - it could easily be twice as big.

The quasi-criminal nature of gold-farming made it hard to truly gauge its extent, said Prof Heeks.

In most online games all the activities associated with gold farming - gathering in-game cash to items to sell, buying game gold or sharing accounts - are a violation of the terms governing that title.

Anyone caught engaging in any of these activities is likely to be banned from the game and have their account shut down.

"I was drawn to write about gold farming due to my perception that it's a significant phenomenon that academics and development organisations are unaware of," he told the BBC.

Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry.

You could get rid of it, but you would get rid of one of the most fundamental parts of player-to-player interaction. Steve Davis, Secure Play

"The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000," said Prof Heeks. "Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile."

Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the "virtual offshoring" likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace.

"It is also a glimpse into the digital underworld," he said. "Or at least the edges of a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers and which has spread to the "Third World" far more than we typically realise."

Cashing out

Steven Davis, chief of game security firm Secure Play, said gold farming had been around since the earliest days of online gaming but had mushroomed along with the popularity of gaming. The trade was clearly meeting a real need, he said.

Economic depth in games such as Eve Online means it is not as prone to gold farming

"When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet," he said.

While exchanges of goods and gold take place inside game worlds the deals are typically done via one of many hundreds of online market places and shops. Some gold farming sites employ just a handful of people but many were large businesses with hundreds of people on their books.

A hierarchy of gold farmers arranged by where wages were lowest was starting to emerge, said Mr Davis. For instance, the low wages gold farmers in Vietnam will accept means they now do for Chinese gamers what many in China do for those in the West.

"It's moving down the chain," he said.

Gold-farming was proving so lucrative that criminal gangs were cashing in on it, said Mr Davis. These pay for their accounts with stolen credit cards, take money from players and do not hand over gold or goods in return and fill chat channels with adverts for websites hawking game gold.

There were also significant problems in tracking down and prosecuting those behind the gold-farming, he said.

Games makers had tried to limit the amount of trade in game gold and gear, few had reported significant success, said Mr Davis.

"You could get rid of it," he said, "but you would get rid of one of the most fundamental parts of player-to-player interaction."

Film addict' Lucas on Clone Wars

By Rajesh Mirchandani BBC News, Los Angeles Advertisement Clips from Star Wars: The Clone Wars One of the most successful movie series of all time returns - with the release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This one is different from previous instalments - it is entirely animated.... and it came about by accident. A movie series that relies heavily on computer graphics has gone one step further: now there is not a single human actor in sight. Star Wars audiences grew up with special effects, puppets and models in the first trilogy, and sophisticated computer animation in the second trilogy. George Lucas's Lucasfilm company is a world leader in animation techniques and has been widely praised for the richly detailed universe it has created. So, in some ways, one critic has mused, it is a natural progression for the creators of Star Wars to get rid of meddlesome humans and stick to a world they can control totally. Anakin Skywalker has a padawan [apprentice] called Ahsoka Tano And of course, if a scene goes wrong, rather than film another costly "take", just press "delete", as it were, and start again. But what is surprising, especially for a multi-billion dollar Hollywood uber-brand like Star Wars, that is so tightly-controlled, is the unusual genesis of this latest movie: it was never meant to be made. Star Wars: The Clone Wars was conceived as a cartoon series for American television. (A word of warning here: the next few paragraphs are unapologetically geeky - so if you are not a nerd, best skip them). Fans will remember the Clone Wars were mentioned in the very first movie - Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977 - in an exchange between Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Fans will see Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker They refer to the devastating conflict between the droid army of the Separatists (the baddies) and the army of Clonetroopers created by the Republic (the good guys who later become the Evil Empire) who are led by the Jedi (the cool guys with the lightsabers). Yet the conflict itself, which sets the scene for the first trilogy, was only briefly glimpsed in Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). Creator George Lucas felt there was enough material for a spin-off animated TV show. It was designed to tell, in dozens of 30-minute small screen "mini-movies", the many tales and adventures of the Clone Wars. (OK, non-nerds, back you come). But when George Lucas saw the first finished material from the TV cartoon series, he decided it was too good for just the small screen. "I have the advantage of not having to have a business plan about movies," he tells me at his vast, sparkling production facility nestled in the hills of Marin County (on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where real estate is among the world's most expensive). George Lucas on his latest Star Wars project "I have the advantage of being able to come up with an idea and say 'this is a good idea' and 'gosh this turned out so great, why don't we move it over here and do this'....it's kind of ad-hoc movie-making. "We started working on the [TV]series and we developed all this new technology, new techniques, this different look to everything and I saw it.....and I said 'wow this is good enough to be a feature film. Why don't we make a feature film?'". The TV series will still go ahead in the autumn, and will of course benefit from the publicity juggernaut of the feature film. While the TV show is clearly aimed at younger viewers (with the introduction of a new feisty female Jedi sidekick called Ahsoka Tano), the film's director Dave Filoni is confident older audiences will not be put off. "People are still getting used to the idea now that film-makers are doing animated movies for everybody," he said. "But we're seeing a big breakthrough with Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda [two recent successful animated movies]. Audiences at large are just going and adults are enjoying it, kids are enjoying it and I think Star Wars has always been part of that." Clone troopers will fight against an army of battle droids The animation style itself is noteworthy. The battles, the space scenes, the alien worlds are astonishingly detailed, epic and gripping. The characters, meanwhile, are drawn with the sharp angles of the Japanese anime style and move like Thunderbirds puppets. There is no attempt to make them realistic: producers say this was deliberate, to set the animated show apart from the Star Wars that had gone before. Audiences will have to decide for themselves if it is a success, but it certainly gives this Star Wars incarnation a unique character. Of course Star Wars die-hards will be trampling over Yoda to point out that George Lucas himself said, some years ago, that there would be no more feature-length films. Now he admits he cannot let go. "It's hard to put it down, it's addictive. Obviously for the fans too but it's worse for me than most people!" Remember the six existing Star Wars movies to date have made more than $4bn (£2bn) worldwide (that is just ticket sales, it does not include merchandise), and the addiction Lucas talks of seems enviable to say the least, and certainly understandable. Anakin Skywalker is first seen as a child in the Star Wars films And it will not stop with Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He is working on another spin-off TV series, this time much darker, more adult. "This is the kind of thing where the studios say 'you can't do that, it will destroy the franchise'," he tells me, after our interview is over. Still, he's doing it. He is George Lucas: he invented Yoda. For this new project though, he is using real actors. The film version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars will open in the US and UK on 15 August followed by a TV series in the autumn.