Everquest richer than Bulgaria! From Declan McCullagh’s Politech:

. . . Norrath, the setting for the online game Everquest, has been found to be the 77th richest country in the world, sandwiched between Russia and Bulgaria.

. . . .Research carried out in the United States shows that virtual internal markets, combined with illegal online trading on auction websites, mean that Norrath has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, bigger than China and India.

. . . .”You’ll log onto the game world and meet them in a tavern or in a town so the virtual you will meet the virtual other player who will hand over the gold to you or they’ll hand over the sword to you and the whole transaction actually occurs in virtual space.”

. . . . He said that people are putting hundreds of hours a year into these characters and you can tell how valuable that is in terms of money by looking at how much these characters sell on open markets such as auction sites like ebay where they can fetch hundreds of US Dollars.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1899000/1899420.stm>