Interesting look inside the Chinese gold farmer industry and how it all began (from Wired Magazine).
The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
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Re: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
#2I have some personal experience with this industry. When I was in high school, I ran a small site selling Diablo II items to people. Walked away with a little money at the end of the summer, but never figured out how to scale the business past just the founders, and we had to go back to school in the fall.
It was an awesome experience. Marketing was interesting: we had a very clean, professional site and made ourselves out to be the "trustworthy" alternative. Our major competitors had pretty poor quality websites.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
#3Printer friendly: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_...
Re: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
#4Well from someone that has had Brock try to aggressively buy out one of his companies in the past and have talked to him many times before... He's a bit of a well... tool.
Actually many of my experiences with Brock and what his company did the reputation of the virtual currency industry was the inspiration for my startup to empower the user to vote with their dollars by providing them information on the background of these virtual currency companies (startup: http://www.gamerates.com; also provides charts of exchange rates and covers industry news: our coverage of this piece is at: http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/happy_thanksgiving_from_...).
Re: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
#5It is amazing to me that Goldman Sachs didn't see this coming. They were selling a commodity product, had zero barriers to entry in their industry and were fundamentally in a business that Blizzard was prohibiting. They has huge risks of competition undercutting them (it happened), Blizzard breaking their backs (it happened) and even, if Blizzard would ever potentially permit this, why wouldn't it get into the business itself just selling the goodies from inventory?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
#6It is amazing to me that Goldman Sachs didn't see this coming. They were selling a commodity product, had zero barriers to entry in their industry and were fundamentally in a business that Blizzard was prohibiting. They has huge risks of competition undercutting them (it happened), Blizzard breaking their backs (it happened) and even, if Blizzard would ever potentially permit this, why wouldn't it get into the busine…
Or more to the point: Just creating the goodies out of thin air.