Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

There is a video clip released on YouTube describing a new profession in China, the online game workshops. They gave the workers an interesting name: Chinese Gold Farmers.

The business idea is simple, you have hundreds of teenagers playing popular international online games (e.g. World Of Warcraft)days and nights (I mean 12+ hours a day), eating boxed food, sleeping on the floor (for a very short time), open up the curtains a couple of hours every week! From the intensive team plays, these players get high level characters, rare weapons and virtual gold. Then the company put these virtual merchandises onto eBay, get bought by the American and Japanese players.

This idea may sounds tedious, but the truth is there are hundreds of this types of "Game Workshops" opened in China and there are well organized "outsourcing" infrastructure behind these commercial "services". The profits are real and the business are expanding.

What I like about this is that soon people may find thousands of best WOW players in China. What I find sad about is the gamers are taking these
"virtual products" way too serious! The hours of online playing are destroying their life and health. But hey, like the kids in the video say, I am earning money while playing my favorite game, what else can one ask?!

According to a recent report (published by Guang Ming Daily) on 2005 Chinese Gaming Industry, there are over 10,000,000 registered students playing online games on a daily basis. There are total of 26.34 million online gamers in China and 38.9% of them are registered students.

The majority age group of the total online players is between 16 to 30. 33.3% of them (8.77 million) are between 19 to 22, 28.4% (7.48 million) of them are between 22 to 25.