Would giving the opportunity to make real money through games ruin games?

I would assume so considering that money can really get to people's heads once they start raking it in. It can become something that's not for fun anymore and something just to make money off of.

 

People are already making real money through games. Using both legitimate and illegitimate means.

Streamers and Youtubers technically do this already, I guess. There are also big tournaments with million dollar prize pools these days too. But, I'll assume that's not what you're talking about.

The problem with making real money in-game is that the amount of effort you'd have to put probably isn't worth the payout you'd be getting. Auction houses especially are very competitive markets where it comes down to who is playing more and spending their time more efficiently.

 

I think some forummer has correctly pointed out that there is already an economy for this(black market or not). The rarity of an item in an MMORPG is usually undisputed and these gears would almost always fetch some neat cash provided you know how to find buyers.

 

As much as I would love to make money through playing games - I do think that it would ruin a lot of games. People would start cashing out their money, rather than paying for gear upgrades, which hurts the community as a whole. Unless they set it up where you could only cash out so much depending on your gear level or something similar. That would help combat bots too since bots hardly ever try to get great gear.

 

As long as money-making and fun-having players are separated then no, I don't think it would ruin games. As a matter of fact, with the rise of e-sports, I'd wager those money-making servers would get interesting to watch. Game companies could make a lot of money setting up Twitch channels and whatnot just to stream their servers 24/7.

 

well that really is the cause of the concept of BTC or BTA items. It was mainly to confront what had happened with Diablo 2.

The problem was GM tickets. In Diablo 2, there was a huge HUGE blackmarket for items and there were a handful of semi-legetimate 3rd party websites. The problem was that whenever a deal went back, the player who got ripped off would file a ticket with Blizzard. I heard numbers that almost half of all tickets for D2 were related to third party websites.

Which is one of the reasons the RMAH was such a big part of the launch of D3. It wasn´t so much that Blizzard wanted to get in on the action, it was more that they wanted to control and regulate the trades so that scams did not happen. Unfortunetely that all caused them to alter the gameplay in a way that players did not like, so now there is no RMAH but loot is BTA

 

Good point, but keep in mind that companies wouldn't want to profit the users more than themselves... making money wouldn't be promoted as a "perk" of playing their game at all, I'm sure of it. It would be put at the very top of the "what to do" hierarchy.