The Future Is Virtually Here

I ncreasingly popular for more than a decade, massively multiplayer online role-playing games now generate remarkable revenues. The current king of MMORPGs, World of Warcraft, boasts 10 million active subscribers as of early 2008. Developed by Blizzard, WoW hosts a virtual population larger than the real-world populations of countries such as Sweden and Hungary. In addition to population numbers, MMORPGs post some substantial economic figures as well. Back in 2002, economist Edward Castronova attempted to measure the gross national product of EverQuest, the leading MMORPG at that time. He started by estimating how much the game’s players were producing each year through quest completion and loot gathered from vanquished monsters. This domestic product took the form of virtual money (platinum pieces in EverQuest ’s fantasy world), virtual goods such as powerful magic swords and armor, and powerful virtual characters. EverQuest’s popularity had already led to a black market in which these virtual goods could be bought and sold for real-world currency. The market remained black because EverQuest’s publisher, Sony Online Entertainment, considered it a violation of the game’s rules to sell virtual goods for real money. Sony has since reversed this policy and now runs its own service that sells virtual goods to its players. By studying the black market, Castronova measured the value of EverQuest’s gross domestic product in real-world currency. Somewhat surprisingly, the game’s gross national product turned out to be $2,266 per capita—larger than the GNP for India and China and just behind Russia (www.walrusmagazine. com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/19292 05&tid=1).