Determining the Money Supply of a Virtual World
6 Pages Posted: 12 Mar 2009
Date Written: March 11, 2009
Abstract
People have been studying virtual worlds for a while now, but there has been little discussion on the money supply. Currently, most virtual world developers do not publish data on the money supply and so I developed a method in estimating it. Using economic theory and the exchange rate, I was able to check the accuracy of my estimate. After applying my method to World of Warcraft, I believe there is over nine billion gold on North American servers. If that gold were converted to USD, it would be worth $192 million, and if the same held true for all World of Warcraft players, there would be $747 million.
Keywords: virtual world, money supply, mmo, mmorpg, world of warcraft
JEL Classification: L86
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation