The following represents some notes and comments building on my earlier research report on gold farming. It draws mainly from a couple of interviews kindly given by Anthony Gilmore, who has been filming in China for his forthcoming documentary, Play Money: http://www.playmoneyfilm.com. Also from Rowenna Davis’ earlier article that interviewed both myself and Anthony.

A. Overall Prevalence:

Estimates of 400,000 people working in China on gold farming/trading are seen as very realistic, and the number could be 500,000 up to 1,000,000 (the latter figure is also estimated in Nick Ryan’s recent articles on RMT, which claims total turnover for Chinese RMT operations of US$10bn per year). There are many brokerages in all major cities in China (Ryan’s article estimates 60,000 in total).

B. Brokers and Farms:

Brokers (i.e. those doing the trading of currency/accounts/levelling) employ English-speaking graduates, and so locate within main cities (those graduates would not go to work in more out-of-the-way places). These are seen as legitimate customer services businesses.

Gold farms employ those with just high-school diplomas or below, and so the farms are put where they can get space cheaply; typically some way outside a city or in smaller towns/cities. Of course, there are limits to this: they still need a broadband connection, so this goes down as far as medium-sized towns but not yet to small towns and villages.

There is typically an n-to-n relationship: each gold farm ("workshop") serves multiple brokerages; each brokerage sources from multiple gold farms. (Though there are also cases where brokerages own their own gold farm.)

The relationships to date have been almost exclusively in-China. However, some brokerages were starting to look to other locations outside China for gold farms, such as VietNam and the Philippines. It is not clear if this is to reduce labour costs further, or to link up with sources for games that are particularly popular in those countries.

C. Typical Brokerage Size and Division of Labour:

In Changsha, one of the main brokerages (with a turnover of around US$1.5m per year) employs more than 130 staff: 20 people doing ads in game and email spamming; 4-5 on customer services with whom players place orders. These numbers are doubled because they work two shifts in a day. There are 5-6 in the IT department sorting out servers and Internet connections. Then there’s the delivery department who interact with the gold farm and deliver the money in-game. They contact the gold farms to find out how much money they have banked on particular servers, and will take amounts until they can fulfill the customer order.

There are some gender divisions of labour: most customer services staff are women; almost all gold farmers and technical staff are men.

D. Gold Farmers and Other Workers:

The gold farms Anthony saw were full of young guys aged around 18-20 with beers and cigarettes, hanging out playing games and having a good time. They realise it’s not a long-term occupation but they also appreciate that they are part of something that is rather new and different. His estimate is that they’ll stay for maybe 1-2 years before moving on to another kind of job.

Typical earnings, etc are in line with earlier estimates: around US$140 per month with food and accommodation provided, working c.10 hours per day. It seems there are two 10-hour shifts per day, with some down time allowed for IT maintenance, though the notion of a strict shift period isn’t present: start and end times are a bit fuzzy and the farmers generally have a target of gold to earn rather than a set number of hours; that target varies depending on market conditions. Some of the gold farmers are killing mobs or gathering resources, but others are making money by arbitrage in the auction houses or trade channels on WoW.

Customer service staff in the brokerage are paid more like US$350 per month; they typically deal with 100 or more customers per shift. Managers earn significantly more (unfortunately no figures available).

E. Customers:

Brokers have a mix of Chinese and Western customers. Some brokers are wholly World of Warcraft-dedicated; others work a mix of Chinese and Western MMORPGs. Typical purchases are for around US$25-worth of in-game currency. (Highest reported purchase was for more than US$3,000.)

F. Bots/Automation:

There is quite a lot of use of automated software in the gold farms, to automate fighting or resource gathering. At least some of this is written in China, bought by the gold farms and then the code is adapted by gold farm staff.

Photo credit: Anthony Gilmore