I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft And It Sucks...

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

Dean Fletcher

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

Blizzard Entertainment You know you're living in 2016 when a story about people running an illicit digital currency operation in a virtual world ends by pointing out that the whole fad is now all but over. The world is moving on.

Jeremy thinks he has only a few years left in his job, and here's the big reason:

Blizzard Entertainment The games nally gave in and just let players buy the gold directly. In a limited capacity, anyway -- if you're a player looking to buy your way to better gear in WOW, you can buy a $20 token that can then be traded in an in-game auction house for gold. The purchaser of the token can't redeem it for cash -- they can use it only toward free months of their game subscription (to prevent farming).

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks) Jeremy says the decision caused a panic among the gold farming community. And although the demand for black market gold still exists, Jeremy has seen his income fall, despite putting more hours in this year than last. These days, those kind of "pay to win" micro-payment systems -- you know, the very thing that makes supposedly free mobile games so insufferable -- have become standard.

Glu Games Inc. It's the same business model that keeps Kim Kardashian in deceptively expensive see-through knits.

That's something that nobody talks about when it comes to these scummy "pay to harvest your crops faster" games -- before they were around, people wanted to pay to win but couldn't. That's why the gold farmers could make a living off the black market. There was a demand.

So while the more "prestigious" MMOs like WOW railed against gold buying for years because it represented an unfair imbalance to poorer players, once it became clear that Jeremy and his co-workers weren't going to be scared away, the developers decided they might as well be the ones to cash in. These companies started offering the services directly themselves, eroding what used to be a $900 million-per-year free-for-all.

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

Blizzard Entertainment "If my hands were better animated, I'd be flipping Blizzard the bird right now."

Jeremy admits he continues on this career trajectory almost entirely out of habit, and at least a touch of fear. And some of his colleagues are straight-up stuck doing this. He told us about a friend from Florida who "is wheelchair-bound and lives off of disability [insurance], and he does this as a side job." And another friend who has made a living from this so long that gold farming is "all he knows."

As the digital gold market collapses, Jeremy worries for his friends. "I don't know what's going to happen to them," he says.

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I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)

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I'm Paid To Play World Of Warcraft All Day (And It Sucks)