Making money playing online games is for real.

An electronic version of the sacred mancave, where men can relax, have fun, and even learn a thing or two

23
October

How to make money online and work from home – Pt.3

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As I continue to look at ways to make money online I am drawn to video games like a moth to fire. Like most boys I grew up playing video games and absolutely love them and even more nowadays with the amazing graphics, technology, and MMORPG environments. Nothing seems like a better dream job than making money from it, whether it be as the much coveted “game tester” or a game designer but those lofty goals are hard to come by. That doesn’t mean though that their aren’t legitimate ways to make money playing video games or off of the popularity of the video game industry. I know people that have been paid to play accounts for people to minimize the “grinding” for people that can’t or don’t want to play as much to experience things they consider fun, as well as people that have sold virtual items or more specifically “the time invested in acquiring the special objects” since most end user license agreements and terms of service agreements forbid the sale of virtual property as it is exclusively the right of the game company, there are also websites you can sell this stuff to in a third party fashion, there are ways of monetizing ancillary websites that provide information and support to people playing a popular game, some players that are very good even get major corporate sponsorships and play in game tournaments with real prize money, and then there are games that you can actually make real money in without ever spending any of your own just by doing tasks and then making “ATM like” withdrawals. In most cases you probably won’t get rich but if you love a game, and spend a lot of time in that virtual world you may be able to make a little bit of cash while doing something you love.

The first and probably most notable option is taking advantage of an extremely popular online game like World of Warcraft which has a huge fan base and global reach with a reported 11M+ registered player count that fork out a monthly fee to play the game. An MMORPG like this requires countless hours of playing time to earn things to make the game more fun ironically and to build status and power within the virtual environment. Now World of Warcraft isn’t the only game like this but it serves as a good example for the many options you have to monetize video game playing time. One of the most common ways is selling virtual currency to resellers or fellow gamers. If you spend enough time playing and find yourself sitting on a stash of cash or gold or whatever they call it you can turn this into real money by selling it to websites that deal in this sort of thing or you can sell it to people you know in the game or even on craigslist or other websites. This is frowned upon by some game companies so you need to know the rules and be careful. One friend of mine in World of Warcraft focused on the economy and accumulating items that could be sold and then bought all of a certain type to create an artificial demand and then sold them 1 at a time in the trade channel or via the auction house. If you pay attention to these things its not that hard to earn money in these games. Just figure out the easiest way to acquire what you want. Now once he had a stash of virtual gold he sold it to guild members and on ebay with paypal and ended up making $3500 over the summer by playing World of Warcraft part time. That’s not too bad in my opinion. Another successful strategy I have witnessed is playing an account until you reach the max level and acquire a fair amount of virtual property and status from playing and then listing it for sale again on one of these game websites or craigslist and ebay. The key to this though is getting in early when gamers are hell bent on being the first to do and see things and capitalize on the time it takes to max a character or class type out. They are more willing to fork over a lot of cash early on in a games success than later when it’s been around for a few years. Some accounts sell for the price of the game plus a few bucks only fetching $100 but well played accounts early on have gotten as much as $2000 for the account user name and password to be forked over to another user. Some people just want to play around at the highest level and not deal with all of the learning on the way up.

World of Warcraft has also seen a rise in offshoot or support websites that drive a LOT of traffic by bringing gamers together outside of the virtual world to ask and answer questions about the game. Many of these sites create databases and lists of all of the items, monsters, characters, etc in the game so players can search on them to learn more about them like what they are worth, where they are found, how rare they are, what they look like, etc… Many of these sites also offer bulletin board type pages where players ask questions to the community about the game or provide tips and strategies to accomplishing certain feats or tasks within the game. Some popular examples of this include Wowhead, Allakhazam, and swagvault. As the game matures and expands these websites continue to add content from their own experience but also by getting their users to upload game information to swell their database of information as well. These websites become very popular and can be around for a long time generating timeless traffic that you can capitalize on with site advertising or if you are well organized and ambitious even selling strategy guides or step by step leveling guides with JoanasGuide being one of the most comprehensive and popular examples. To make money think in terms of how to reduce the amount of time another player has to spend playing in the game as a Peon so they can spend the majority of the game playing as a Champion. In the end that’s the biggest driver in most cases, everyone wants to be a hero not a peasant and it takes time a lot of people don’t have. So next time you hear of a new hyped up online game coming out try to reserve a website name and get it set up to start serving that community when the game is launched and even before if you have access to information. Make yourself the first place they look for information on the game when they start playing.

Yet another aspect of World of Warcraft where you can make money and a hell of a lot of it is in the World of Warcraft Global PVP Tournaments. The 2009 Warcraft PVP tournament has a total cash prize pool of $200,000 with the winning team taking home $75,000, not bad for playing a video game. On top of that many of the top rated Warcraft PVP players in the world get sponsorships just like pro athletes. So if you are good enough and practice a lot this may be another way to capitalize on this video game phenomenon. Many of the top players in the world have sponsorship deals with Mouseports, Mountain Dew, Intel, and others that make them a nice sum of money on top of their tournament winnings.

Continuing with the video game tournament theme to make there is also a site called BringIt where you can enter tournaments for a lot of different games on XBOX and PS3, some for $10 and have a chance at winning thousands of dollars. Time are changing!

Another interesting and completely different possibility for making money playing a video game is a concept and game called Project Entropia. Mindark, the creator, has developed a game universe and platform for an MMORPG environment where real currency is used with a fixed exchange rate of 10 Project Entropian Dollars (PED) to 1 USD. The game is free to download and play with no recurring monthly fees. Initially it takes place on a distant alien world from earth call Calypso where you can participate in a social and economic world with other online players. Similar to other MMORPG’s a player can buy clothing, armor, weapons, and hunt dinosaurs and big game. They can rent a home or apartment and decorate it, store gear and items there, and sell items to the game or other gamers in the world. There are transportation systems that players can take to other areas of the world to explore as well. So it’s basically not that much different than other online games with the exception that you can link your bank account to it and deposit money or withdraw money like an ATM machine. So although the game is free you can spend money to get yourself going early on if you want to and vice versa if you are making more money in the game than you need you can withdraw it right to your bank account which is pretty cool. I played Project Entropia for awhile to see how legit it was and I was able to play without spending a dime on the game or in it and started out basically as a peasant with nothing. There are very few things you can do to earn money at this point in the game but earn it you can with enough time. Things like collecting fruit and dung in the wild and selling it or collecting sweat from dinosaurs and selling it since they use it for some type of energy. It was grueling but can be done. On the other hand, as you play you will see announcements in the game for big achievements like a group or player “Slayed a T-Rex worth $78PED” which translates easily in your head into someone just making $7.80 USD by slaying a virtual dinosaur in this game. Of course, it takes awhile to be able to take on a T-Rex but hey, you can make real money by hunting big game. For my own part, I was able to make a couple bucks after many many hours of playing just to verify it was possible. Some times the creatures drop money, items, hide, teeth, etc that can be sold in the game to create things by merchants as raw materials. So you can also “work” in this game by buying creating and selling items to players. Another interesting thing about the Entropia Universe is that Mindark is creating the ability for investors to build new “planets” which are built on the Mindark Entropia platform but with the ideas and structure that the investor wants in their world. The business model is a revenue share model where half of the revenue goes to Mindark and half goes to the “Planet Owner”. There is only one planet launched which is the original Calypso by Mindark but there are currently 4-5 in “coming soon” status. The site says that revenue averages $1 per hour per user playing on the planet. I haven’t investigated this aspect of Project Entropia personally but think it is a pretty neat idea and if you always wanted to launch a video game but didn’t have the means or complete knowledge to do so leveraging Mindark’s experience and business model is a pretty attractive opportunity. I have also seen sites that say it costs $.50 – $1.50 an hour to play the game if you are putting money into it and not doing the grueling things to earn money.

In Project Entropia similar to other vastly popular online games like Everquest, Ultima Online, Half Life, and others you can buy and sell virtual real estate as well. In 2003 big news was made when a deliveryman bought a virtual house in Ultima Online for $750 and a few years later a player named Neverdie paid $100,000 for an asteroid called Club NEVERDIE where you can hunt big game and mine and in August of 2006 reported profits of $100,000 already. Recently there was an online auction for 4 virtual banking licenses that sold for an average of $101,000 each to integrate real world banking systems into the Entropia universe. Another example of of making real money in Entropia is the story of a high school kid and his mom making $35,000 in Project Entropia by making and selling weapons in the virtual world of Calypso for about 3 hours a day. There is a lot of activity in Project Entropia, even by the Chinese government having them create a real virtual economy for China and an ambitious plan of attracting 150M players eventually. If the projections and possibilities are even close to being right and the purported $1 per hour average per online player this translates into one hell of a big opportunity and despite it being around for the last 4-5 years is still relatively unknown and basically the tip of the iceberg for anyone still wanting to get in on it. The part that unnervers me about it though is that someone else controls that world completely, the servers it sits on, the coding that creates things in the game, distribution, luck, and many other things that I would feel better knowing were regulated or audited or something. So it’s possible to make money as people have said but I am still not ready to go buy some virtual property as an investment, yet.

With social networking exploding in the past couple of years and the integration and expansion of massively multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Project Entropia the probability and possibility is endless. Online gaming revenue in China alone is forecast to exceed $9B annually by 2013 with 83% of people saying they spend real money to buy virtual property in an online game to have more fun. These trends can’t be ignored, it’s going to be one of the next big economic booms in the world and there is still time to get on the train and even be a conductor. So don’t just have fun playing games, make some money too.

See Part 1 of How to make money online and work from home.

3 Responses

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Hayley2
i Make Money Online by using Adsense and Adbrite on my blogs and websites. i am earning a decent amount of money online but it also requires a lot of work to build traffic..
November 1, 2009 at 11:29 am