Collecting the booty

These Chinese companies employed $4-an-hour workers who tended three or four computers throughout shifts, mindlessly hunting monsters, collecting the booty but not advancing the game.

IGE bought the gold in bulk and then sold it on to cashed-up players too lazy or desperate to find their own in-game currency, and Bannon wanted to get in on that. For a time it was a successful venture and IGE was reportedly reaping hundreds of millions of dollars.

But IGE was struggling with the legitimacy of its completely illegitimate business and in 2006, Bannon hoped to add Goldman Sachs validity to the venture by pouring in $US60 million.

Unfortunately for the investment bank and the future chief adviser to the president, the timing was pretty dreadful.

Steve Bannon, chief strategist for US President Donald Trump, had earlier leanings towards fantasy worlds. Bloomberg

Blizzard was cracking down on the gold farmers, who were hoovering up resources at the expense of genuine players and were inflating the cost of in-game equipment.

The parent of WoW was shutting down hundreds of thousands of gold-farming accounts a month, costing IGE hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory.


Then, just months after Goldman Sachs entered, a 28-year-old gamer filed a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against IGE for "substantially impairing" and "diminishing" the collective enjoyment of basically every other WoW player.

The lawsuit was brutal and it was the final nail in the coffin of Goldman Sachs's foray into the shady world of gaming currency markets. IGE unravelled, cut the gold-farming arm and changed its name to Affinity Media which now runs online forums.

<i>WoW</I> tokens are fetching a hefty amount of virtual gold.

But alas ... What a missed opportunity!

In-game auction house

Because lo and behold, World of Warcraft in-game markets are going insane this week after Blizzard opened up an exchange for players to use real money to buy WoW Tokens.

For $US20 ($26), players can buy these tokens and put them up for sale on an in-game auction house. Players then purchase the WoW tokens with in-game gold. With a WoW Token, players can then add 30 days of game time to their account or add $US15 to their Battle.net balance.

Speculators unite!

There has been blistering demand for these tokens: within 24 hours of the announcement, the cost almost doubled on US servers, reaching over 110,000 gold.

The price has settled somewhat at 80,000 gold. And while it's difficult to quantify a market capitalisation, it seems a rather liquid and lucrative new market indeed.

As newly instated adviser Bannon gears up to announce how the new Trump administration will pay for its infrastructure blitz, it's unlikely he'll be able to tap into the rivers of gold that run through the virtual lands of Azeroth.