China Bans Virtual Goods Selling

Some say that PC gaming is dying, but that’s hardly the case. What has seemed to have happened over the course of the past ten years is a shift of the type of games people play. MMORPG titles are more popular than ever, and with World of Warcraft exceeding 10,000,000 subscribers at the current time, it doesn’t look like the trend is going to die off anytime soon.

If you are one of the millions that currently subscribe to an MMO (*raises hand*), you likely know just how much of a problem gold-selling is, and perhaps you’ve even partook in some of this forbidden fruit yourself. I’d like to think that the majority of people who play an MMORPG would agree that gold-selling is a problem, and it’s for what I believe to be obvious reasons. Gold-selling means more bots and a skewed in-game economy… it’s that simple. But as hard as the game companies try to stop it, their attempts all but ultimately fail.

But, I read with great excitement the other day that the Chinese government has declared that virtual currency and services cannot be traded or sold. This is huge news, as China has the vast majority of gold-sellers. Will such a ruling actually thwart the practice? Here’s to hoping it will, but it’d be awful naive to believe that the problem is simply going to vanish. For something like this to remain truly effective, the entire world would have to create laws around it, and that’s obviously not going to happen (and it shouldn’t given all the more important things going on). Oh well, it’s at least a start… now to see if we’ll actually notice a difference.

The Chinese government estimates that trade in virtual currency exceeded several billion yuan last year, a figure that it claims has been growing at a rate of 20% annually. One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146 million. The ruling is likely to affect many of the more than 300 million Internet users in China, as well as those in other countries involved in virtual currency trading. In the context of online role playing games like World of Warcraft, virtual currency trading is often called gold farming.