Can You Make Real Money While Gaming Online?

Earning money by gaming is the dream of almost all young gamers. And though it may appear like an impossible task, there are plenty of people out there actually making a living playing online games. The ways they apply to do so are fascinating, even though you don’t have any desire to do so yourself. From eSport athletes earning a six-figure sum per year by winning tournaments before crowds to game testers earning a near minimum wage with little admiration, the field to make real money while gaming online is a wide and diverse one. And one of the most popular ways is selling virtual goods.

Farm Gold and Other Items

Gold farming exists since long. If you are a gamer who has played a massively multiplayer online RPG such as World of Warcraft, you have certainly seen spammers advertising their prices for gold in-game. Even item-selling exists since long. Diablo 2 featured an ecosystem of black market-type websites where players were able to sell their items to other gamers for cash.

Selling virtual items went mainstream with the arrival of Diablo 3 and its real-money auction house. It was integrated in the game and it was not only allowed, but also encouraged – it helps that Blizzard earns $1 from each sale (15% for commodities and currency) and another 15% when you cash out through PayPal. Even for Blizzard themselves, it is definitely lucrative.

There are all types of anecdotes about the real money auction house. Some says he’s earned more than $10,000 legitimately and even presents screenshots of the Diablo 3 auction house and his PayPal account, while a bot user says that he earns 80 cents per hour per bot. This results into inflation which reduces the value of gold and other things – such kinds of things have to faced by legitimate players.

There is a conception out there that one can hire a group of people in a foreign country for pennies on the dollar to spend innumerable hours farming valuable loot and in-game currency to sell to gamers through online transaction. Once a gamer makes a purchase, an in-game agent passes on the money.

Selling Characters

A commonly occurring service of these gold marketers is character selling. You have to throw a certain amount to them and they will set your character to the max level and leave it with plenty of goodies and a bank account to boot. Seems a great idea if you don’t like to spend the time it takes to level your character, right? But think again! It can mean that your character is being used to do things like spam-rich areas to sell gold. Moreover, you also risk having account flagged and/or banned once the IPs of the term-violators are found.

Therefore, if you want to make real money through this way, better first study the website’s reliability and other users’ experience and only then you can go ahead.