Jesus Diaz, Determining the Money Supply of a Virtual World,
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 Currently, most virtual world developers do not publish data on the money supply and so I developed a method in estimating it.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.
Not close to enough to help with the current banking crisis, alas.
Care to share this estimation formula?
But the real question is, if Wall Street were run by WoW guilds, would things have turned out better?
Was someone proposing to nationalize World of Warcraft?