Richest Gamers Who Have Turned Virtual Money To Cash

Earning real money playing online games? Confusing to say the least, but don’t be surprised if you start seeing Second Life Linden dollars and World of Warcraft Azerothian gold being traded on the stock market in a few years. Business savvy gamers have turned a handsome profit spending hours in front of their computer screens, defeating three-headed monsters and selling virtual real estate.

How?

eBay and PayPal are the main “banking” sources gamers use in order to trade their virtual loot for cash. Games can get rather long and tedious and sometimes people would rather pay to acquire a certain object so they can move forward in the game. Large-scale corporations have also infiltrated games like Second Life and see the huge business potential. Michelin, IBM and Xerox are already well established in the Second Life community, holding meetings, conducting trainings, building product prototypes, as well as executing customer research and recruiting.

More than just a passing virtual trend, here is a look at some of the world’s most successful gamers and how they made a real fortune playing games.

Ailin Graef

Better known by her avatar name, Second Life’s “real estate baroness” became the first Second Life millionaire in 2006, buying and developing virtual real-estate in a make-believe world. Second Life has a fully integrated economy based on the residents’ ability to buy and sell their virtual creations. The economy is based on the Linden™ dollar (L$), Second Life’s virtual micro-currency. Linden™ dollars are convertible to US dollars. Linden dollars are trading at approximately L$300.00 to the US$1.00.

Role-playing in virtual worlds for years before making her initial investment in Second Life ($9.95 for a Second Life account) she quickly realized that people looking for land didn’t have the programming skills to develop it. In just two and a half years, she has “cash” holdings of several million Linden™ dollars, several virtual shopping malls, virtual store chains, and established virtual brands in Second Life. Using her 3D computer modeling skills her operations have grown to large-scale real world corporations and have led to a real life “spin off” corporation called Anshe Chung Studios, which develops 3D environments for applications ranging from education to business conferencing and product prototyping. She could also make investments to other web entrepreneurs through government grants style loans to others.

Anshe’s Second Life portfolio includes virtual property assets equivalent to 36 square km in size. Anshe Chung’s real name is Ailin Graef. A former school teacher in Frankfurt, Graef was born and raised in Hubei, China, but currently is a citizen of Germany.

Jonathan Yantis

A controversial figure in the gaming world, Jonathan Yantis started his RMT (real-money trading) business in the early days of EverQuest, working out of his house in Rosarito, Mexico. Yantis pioneered corporate-style game currency selling through his site MySuperSales. Netting roughly $2,500 a day (about $1 million in annual profit) he had a dozen in-game delivery agents (the virtual-world equivalent of couriers) in places like Romania, working for the equivalent of $3.50 per delivery, walking their avatars right up to the purchaser’s avatar to hand over the in-game goods.

In 2004, IGE bought out MySuperSales and the merger created a monopoly in the market. Jonathan Yantis was the biggest shareholder in IGE and was made Chief Operating Officer and member of the company’s Board of Managers.

Brock Pierce

Leaving a moderately successful acting career (his biggest role starring alongside Sinbad in Disney’s First Kid) at the age of 16, Brock Pierce became a dot.com entrepreneur, when he teamed up with Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley to found Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), an online video content site. Two years later, he was making $250,000 a year and held one million in DEN stock shares.

But the company soon took a turn for the worse when in the fall of 1999, Collins-Rector settled a suit in New Jersey, brought by a boy who claimed the DEN founders had sexually molested him over three years, starting in 1993 when he was 13. Other DEN employees also began making harassment claims. On October 25, DEN’s three founders resigned and fled to Spain; Pierce always maintaining his innocence.

During their time on seaside resort town of Marbella, Pierce recoiled into a fantasy world of gaming, spending most of his time glued to his computer screen playing EverQuest. In the magical universe of Norrath, Pierce was the dark-elf wizard Athrex, playing on EverQuest’s Vallon Zek server. He eventually started playing on six different computers, hopping from one to the other, mastering the art of “six-boxing”.

After two years of playing eight hours a day, it was time to start making money. By May 2001, Pierce founded IGE (Internet Gaming Entertainment) alongside Alan Debonneville, which was to become the world’s largest retailer of virtual products such as swords, armor, gold coins and other virtual currencies. He set up corporate headquarters in a 700 sq ft office in downtown Marbella and hired some locals to do the farming (i.e. rack up items he could sell for cash). IGE made millions outsourcing the boring aspects of the game for cheap. The company later established offices in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Shanghai and London. In January 2004, IGE acquired it major competitor Yantis Enterprises and they dominated the RMT world.

In 2007, Antonio Hernandezm a WoW gamer filed a lawsuit against IGE for impairing the players’ enjoyment of the game. IGE has been legally banned from selling virtual gold, called Azerothian gold until 2013.

Julian Dibbell author of Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot has long been following the life and times of Brock Pierce and you can read more about Pierce here.

Gareth Lancaster

He is the man behind avatar Moopf Murray, and through Second Life he found a way of making a second income. Racking in an extra $20,000 and $30,000 a year, Gareth Lancaster used his business savvy and designed the Skoopf roller skates selling at $60 a pop. A Second Life best-seller, over 60,000 pairs were sold over two years.

Jon Jacobs

He sold just about everything he owned (in real life) to buy a space station in the Entropia Universe, deemed the first virtual universe with a real cash economy. The space station inside the multiplayer game was sold for $100,000 in late 2005 to gamer Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs who turned it into a virtual nightclub, Club NEVERDIE. Entropia dollars can be exchanged for real dollars at a fixed exchange rate of ten to one, which is guaranteed by MindArk, Entropia’s virtual world developers. The way to progress in Entropia is you gain skills by hunting, gathering, or selling virtual goods. Club NEVERDIE has multiple dance floors, a live amphitheater and lounges, 1,000 apartment complexes, 20 hunting biodomes, commercial space ship dock, themed shopping malls, and a mega stadium for championship sporting events. The net worth in 2006 was estimated at $1.5 million. Not bad for someone who didn’t have to apply for business loans to build his empire.