In this article, we’re here to try to answer the question of if it’s wrong to sell in-game gold or currency for real money?
Real-World Trading: What’s the Problem?
Say you’re a teenager playing your favorite game. You’ve got lots of time, and you’ve got, literally, no actual money at all. Say in that game, since you’ve played it for so long, it’s easy for you to farm up lots of currency, while for newer players, they couldn’t hope to dream to be as rich as you. So, say other players ask to buy some currency from you, and you agree, conveniently turning a hobby into a side-hustle. Is that wrong? Okay. Now, imagine you’re a normal adult in a developing country. Imagine a series of corrupt leaders and bad policies collapse your economy, and imagine that selling gold in a video game is actually a better way to support yourself than by working a traditional job. Is that wrong? Lastly, imagine you’re a twentysomething NEET living in your mom’s basement. Rather than get a job, you cobble together a network of currency traders to exploit a game as much as possible and make obscene amounts of money, operating in a legal gray area that hasn’t been regulated and is conveniently never totally clamped down on by developers. Is that wrong? Most gamers agree that the teen making some cash on the side or the guy just trying to get by in a developing country aren’t doing anything particularly bad, but most would draw the line at the somewhat-shady currency reseller operation that can expand to be quite massive in size. So, that all begs the question, why is one wrong but the others okay?
What’s the Problem With Money in Games?
If you like to read or watch fantasy, you know how important the rules of a world are. If you’ve got a low-fantasy story that’s essentially an alternative history of the Middle Ages, then it would be really weird for some character to start casting fireballs out of nowhere. There’s a similar thing going on with games. See, say you just double the damage a character does, suddenly what was once a fun, engaging experience becomes a mindless, tedious exercise in futility. All by just messing with the rules of the game. Just like how it might feel like it would be awesome if you could be invulnerable in a game and dominate your friends, if that actually happened, it’d suck. So, if there’s a really big grind for something in a game that only the most dedicated players can get and you pay $5 for the gold to just trade for it, even if the item is really cool, you won’t feel much about it because you just got it without having to work for it, while players who did work for it will feel like their work was wasted. On an individual level, though, it’s usually hard to feel like this. If your buddy gives you pizza money for carrying him through a campaign and powerleveling him, well, who cares? Maybe you wouldn’t do it, and maybe if out in the game world you could never tell who’s been powerleveled and who put the time because it was so common you’d feel like players ought to level for themselves, but when it’s just one guy, it doesn’t matter. But if there’s just a niche community of random individuals buying and trading game stuff for real money with each other, well, once again, who cares? The level of access there is to buying game items and how popular or commonplace doing that is are big measures of what is and isn’t okay. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if there are lots of ways to spend money to progress in a game, but it matters that people who play the game don’t feel like that’s what everybody does and you ought to or have to do.
So, Is Real-World Trading Bad?
It’s going to depend. In a game like Runescape where trading RS gold is an industry unto itself, real-world trading is probably bad. In a game like Path of Exile where there are a few sites to buy currency that relatively few people use, it’s probably not a big deal. Even in a game like Animal Crossing where there are loads of items for sale for real-money, it’s not much of a big deal. Ultimately, if doing something in a game isn’t particularly fun or takes a really long time, people will always trade game stuff for real money, so games, unless we manage to perfect them completely, will probably always have real-world trading. However, it’s not much of an issue if the average player doesn’t run into a wall where they feel like the only way to have fun with a game is to spend money.
