Would you pay $725 for 700 million Adena (in game currency) from Lineage 2?

If your answer is “Yes!”, you might want to visit 26-year-old Jazz Li’s website, Golden Turn, for a different kind of ‘window’ shopping.

Pay To Play Better

While most gamers of free Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOGs) turn to the game’s own cash shop to get an edge over other players, others source for more virtual cash and items for their virtual selves
on the websites of professional item mining companies.

Simply type “buy” and a MMOG’s title into your search engine and thousands of sites will offer to sell you rare items and millions of virtual cash for almost any MMOGs.

Jazz started Golden Turn in 2005 when he saw the potential of the global market of gamers, starting by focusing on items and virtual currency in Lineage 2 (International), which was very popular with North American and European customers.

In 3 years, the current University of London Economics Degree student expanded the reach of Golden Turn to other games like World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Dungeons & Dragons.

“The very first 18 months of the business, our system was very basic, like most simple websites which just sell stuff,” he says in an email interview with Urbanwire. However, the website is slowly but surely gaining popularity amongst gamers.

Seeking Bigger Gold Veins
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In the near future, Golden Turn hopes to expand its reach further into games such as Age of Conan.

“There’re still many things which we know we can do. We’re currently trying to improve the business, and beat the competition,” he says.

Jazz also said he noticed that games that target Southeast Asian markets are generally not as profitable as games that target first and second world regions.

“Generally, we see 2 types of customers – those who do not have much purchasing power (and) purchase 1 to 3 times a year and those who have a stable income (and) purchase, on average, twice a week,” he says.

According to the figures provided by Jazz, the former spend US$20 (S$27) to US$50 each time while the latter’s purchases amount from US$50 to US$500 in every transaction.

He remains tight-lipped about the revenue his company is churning out every year but counts Singapore as a substantial market in Southeast Asia.

“Singaporean gamers are rather sophisticated like our American, Canadian, French, German, Japanese, South-Korean counterparts,” he says, “they spend a good amount of their disposable income on MMOGs and related commodities.”

The Customers

Chong Zhi Qiang, 18, consistently buys from both the game operator and online websites like Golden Turn.

“If the game operator offers Double Experience – double experience for a fixed amount of time – which saves my time with me spending only a little cash, I think it’s worth it,” he says.

Little cash is a relative term. “I spent $1500 in the in game shop and the gold service outside,” Zhi Qiang says of his experience playing fantasy MMORPG 2moons (http://2moons.acclaim.com/2mlanding3.html ) for half a year. He adds, “In-game shops don’t sell their gold because it ruins the game market.”

Lest you think Zhiqianq was born with a silver spoon, he works part time while doing his secondary school studies.

But after 6 months of playing, Zhi Qiang got bored of 2moons and wanted to move on to other games. He is now hard pressed to find a buyer for his account.

“Online trading of accounts is without backup, once you get scammed, that’s it,” he says.

Scams could involve tricking players to give up their account before payment is made and scammers leaving behind only a false identity.

While the business may sound lucrative, there are also many underlying costs and challenges that businesses like Golden Turn meet.

Jazz hires professional miners based in China to mine the items and virtual currency that gamers all over the world like Zhi Qiang pay for.

Jazz said that gamers who mine resources a few hours a day get only an average amount of resources. Professional miners do the same mining but on a “massive scale”.

“These professional miners who supply these commodities to us, they pretty much have each and every one of their game accounts logged-in 24/7,” he said.

Bending the Rules

But miners also have to find their way around the game operators who prohibit cash trading. Generally, the game management teams track these miners down and ban them from playing.

Jazz reveals that professional miners in China are paid 1,500 yuan ($300) for an average of 12 hours work for 6 to 7 days a week, the equivalent of a graduate employee’s pay in a medium-sized Chinese city.

“This industry is no longer such that every business in it is lucrative,’ he says, “legitimate companies in this industry need to be run extremely efficiently to be profitable these days.”

Like most other sites that sell virtual items and currency, Golden Turn has employees in their systems who control their characters and manually give out the goods at a scheduled time. Jazz explains that automating the process is not cost effective for existing games and thus meet ups have to be scheduled for the transfer of items from one character to another.

But so far, the response has been good and Golden Turn’s comment pages have been flooded with praise.

“What a bargain. I wish I had known about you guys earlier!” tags Andrew Gomez from Singapore.

Driven by such comments, Jazz is optimistic and hopes to see a ten-fold increase in customers with every major feature release that the site goes through. Well it does seem like his Midas touch is going to continue turning virtual items and currency into real gold.