Buying gold at the expense of Chinese sweatshop laborers
Article by Dypheron
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I'm an avid World of Warcraft player. 2 months ago I said the same thing I'd been saying for years, that I'd never play a game that I had to pay everyone month to play, now I'm logging in just to see if my auction sold. Like so many others I really don't have time to sit and play for hours on end due to a pre-existing condition known as "Real Life," leading me to search the web for some words of wisdom to speed up progress a bit. Digging through page after page of information and trying to ignore all of the bot hawkers and rediculously priced powerleveling guides a thought hit me. I could just buy gold. A few months ago I had read an article on people selling WoW gold on Ebay for rediculous prices so I knew there had to be somewhere out there that provided such a service. A quick google search gave me a few dozen pages worth of retailers, for lack of a better term.
As I shopped around to find the best deal I came across something that didn't really sink in until after the fact. For the princely sum of $24.00 I ordered 250 gold, an amount that would have taken me roughly a week to accumulate at my usual amount of playtime. Was it cheating? Not really, I could have farmed that much in a weekend if I really wanted to. Legal? At the time I thought so. Now, maybe not so much.
You may be wondering at this point what I read that made me think. One of the websites I came across on my merry adventure was wowmine.com. Browsing through the site I noticed a link at the top labeled "Sell Gold." Interesting, I would assume people would come here to buy gold, not sell it. Curiousity got the best of me, so naturally I clicked the link. On the other end of that link was a page that said "售卖您的魔兽世界金币
希望卖金吗？
我们希望和你们合作。如果你有兴趣合作一起干事业，请用QQ联系我们的三位仓管负责人：
QQ: 461610887 星期一至五 上午九点至下午六点 （中国广州时间）
525037128 或 332846867 其他时间
The above message is displayed in Simplified Chinese characters. We partner with Mainland Chinese gamers exclusively for their low labor cost. Therefore, the above message is by no means to discriminate English speaking visitors."
(Pardon the null characters, I don't have the chinese typeset loaded and that's all I can see.) Let's read part of that again. We partner with Mainland Chinese gamers exclusively for their low labor cost. I read that, and kept on clicking. That didn't even sink into my head for processing until mid morning today while I was at work. Deeply involved in something I'd rather not be doing tends to make my mind wander, and for some reason it settled on that one line. It truely bothered me all day to the point where the first thing I did when I got home was read some more. A few more google searches confirmed what I had already halfway decided earlier. I supported a Chinese sweat shop.
The vast majority of all online retailers of in game gold rely on groups mainly based in China to supply gold. The companies act as a middle man, simply passing information from the customer to the group that actively farms on whatever server you play on. Not a bad job one would think, sitting behind a computer and playing video games all day. But when you discover that those same people on average make roughly $150 a month the picture changes, doesn't it? $5 a day, sitting in a room for hours on end for something that is gone in a blink of an eye if Blizzard catches on and deletes the account you were playing on because they noticed the pattern of 24 hour a day farming. i did a bit of math and the numbers that I got back are even more depressing. The average price online is $0.15/1 gold. Assuming the previously stated average monthly wage and also that 100% of the money earned went straight to the person that equals 1000 gold a month. 1000 gold in game is quite the sum of money, something that not too many people I know have ever had at one time, much less made in a month. When you take in to consideration that everyone along the way takes their cut and also the cost of running the business must come out the amount of work goes up even higher. At 25% of the profit, (probably way over the portion they actually recieve) that works out to 4000 gold a month!
Will I buy gold again? Nope. I'll sit and do the work myself before I do that again. If you're thinking about doing it, stay tuned for my next article which will go into detail on the idea that selling in game gold is not unlike online gambling, since tecnically it falls under the definition of a real money transaction, or "RMT" just as the others do.
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