Gold seller goes for $10M

In a strange twist, a company that specializes in the sale of virtual MMO currency for real money has been itself sold for $10 million in real currency. Kotaku reports that the third largest seller of virtual gold, MyMMOShop.com was bought by a private equity company.

What’s unusual about this deal is not that a company traded hands, but rather that a gold farming company has become reputable (or at least profitable) enough to be bought out. Gold farming, or the use of either low cost foreign labor or automated bots to accumulate virtual wealth to be sold to human buyers, violate just about every MMOs’ terms of service agreement. It’s an activity that is monitored by gaming companies which then ban the accounts involved in such activity.

Gold farmers skirt this issue by either using temporary accounts, accounts obtained (legally or illegally) from other users or by just procuring new accounts, marking off the cost of the banned account as simply the cost of doing business. Many players, and certainly just about all gaming companies, view gold farmers as not much different than software pirates because of their quasi-legal business activity.

The sale of MyMMOShop however seems to imply that selling virtual gold is a brisk and profitable business, and that the temptation to cheat themselves to virtual riches is an activity that many players engage in despite the ethical issues involved. The players who buy virtual gold blame the gaming companies. The argument they raise is that gold sellers are merely fullfilling an economic need that gaming companies refuse to recognize, and they feel the situation is analogous to the illegal downloading of music.

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