The interpretation that the new regulation is about gold farming has spread like wildfire. Unfortunately, it is not correct â" the regulation is about the Chinese government staying in control of currency movements within the country; and probably more about gambling than money laundering. Itâ(TM)s not targetted at gold farming, and unlikely to have much of an impact on gold farming. More details at the ICTs for Development blog: http://ict4dblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/china-bans-gold-farming-er-but-in-fact-it-hasnt/

It's good you're pushing me on this, because I do need to question the data. Let me go through in a bit more detail. First, there are around 40m online gamers worldwide. 20m subscription players (WoW has around 50% not 80% of the market); 20m free-play, item-pay (typical in Asia). If 22.5% of players buy (the actual estimate), that's 9 million. The estimate is that buyers spend US$45 per year - so that would be US$405m. If gold farmers are paid US$145 per month (US$1760 per year) and wages are 50% of costs, that would suggest 115,000 gold farmers (1 per 350 overall players; 1 per 80 buying-players). However, there are various reasons to suspect that's an underestimate; largely because we are extrapolating from the pay-to-play Western base, whereas gold farming seems likely far more prevalent in Asian gaming, esp. in free-play, item-pay gaming. Also bottom-up estimate from Chinese cities suggest much larger numbers of gold farmers. So, yes, 1 farmer per 5 player-buyers would seem wrong, but that wouldn't be the figure.