Speculating at the Price of Diablo 3 Gold

So how are we to know how much gold will be “worth” in terms of real dollars when you buy Diablo 3 and crack the box for the first time. Who knows, the first monster you see could drop 100k or you could need to quest for 10 hours to make even 100 gold, so in terms of saing X gold will equal X dollars the information we have now makes this unpractical.

What else can we measure this commodity in? Yes that’s right, hours of work. People in North America (who are the primary buyers of online gold) work for around a minimum wage of $6.00/hr. So let’s assume that is the maximum that people are willing to pay for gold, if they would pay more we’d have gold farms springing up in Alaska. The second question is how much are people willing to do the work for? Most gold farming is done in China where the average wage is around $0.40/hr (and yes I’m sure this number is greatly inflated by the upper class). We also have to take into account brokerage fees, affiliate fees, and the fees of running a gold farm to the owner. For arguments sake I’ll say that the cost to the owner is another $0.10/hr and his profit is $0.10/hr, then the affiliate fees and brokerage fees are probably quite high, around 100% of the cost. So now we have a minimum prince of $1.20/hr. We now have our range per hour of the cost to buy Diablo 3 gold at $1.20 - $6.00/hr.

Next I will explore scarcity (supply and demand), and then efficany of farmers, so if anyone has comments or questions be sure to let me know. I will give you a little hint though, at the begining the price of gold will be HIGH!

The MMORPG Economy

It’s amaising how people will pay real money for objects in games, but then again I suppose that’s the market economy. Why would I go and spend 10 boring hours question for a sword when I can pay some guy from China $3. Why would I go fight the stupidest monsters for countless hours just for gold, when I can buy it for pennies to hours of my time.

People are lazy, people need money, as long as both those things are true there will be an online economy. Diablo 3 will just add to the pile of MMORPGs that people buy stuff for. WoW gold has become the most popular thing for chinese gold farmers, but who knows what will happen with future game releases.