Could World of Warcraft be the world's biggest corporation?
Could World of Warcraft be the world's biggest corporation?
By Mike Smith
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Ten million players. However you look at it, that's a lot. World of Warcraft not only dwarfs all other massively-multiplayer games, it dwarfs a good number of countries -- not silly countries like Monaco and Greenland, either, but perfectly sensible ones. Like Sweden, say, or Israel. But how do the holdings of this legion of players compare to the corporate giants of the world?
Determining what actually is the world's largest company is far from an exact science. Do you measure it by annual revenue, in which case it's ExxonMobil, which pulled in about $400 billion in 2007? Perhaps counting number of employees makes more sense, in which case it's Wal-Mart, which has 1.7 million blue-vested souls on its books. Maybe market capitalization, a measure of the public opinion of the value of a company, is what matters most, in which case it's probably ExxonMobil again.
No matter how you slice it, most of the same names come up time and again -- a cabal of the world's most powerful private economic entities. They include petroleum giants like BP, Shell and ExxonMobil and manufacturing powerhouses like Toyota and General Electric. Some, like HSBC and Citifinancial, are fiscal giants; others, like Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, have fingers in all kinds of pies. One thing's true of them all, however: none have very much in common with World of Warcraft, or its creator, Blizzard Entertainment.
Or do they? You may not be able to buy shares in your Warcraft server, but you can certainly invest in its future. Even continuing to play on a particular server is in a sense an expression of confidence. Unsuccessful online games, like floundering companies, are bound to have the plug pulled on them at some point. As you play, your character accumulates value via experience points, equipment, currency and commodities. What do you get if you total that value across the game's whole population?
You don't really get a corporation, of course. Neither, though it's fun to play the relative-population game, do you get a nation. Here, Warcraft's users pay a monthly fee to Blizzard to be part of the world, like some kind of exclusive gated community, rather than being citizens, employees or shareholders. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the trading going on across Warcraft's hundreds of realms certainly qualifies it as an economic force in its own right.
If you're part of the ever-shrinking majority who's never taken a step in Warcraft's world, you probably aren't prepared for the richness of the ebb and flow of supply and demand that's taking place every day in Azeroth. On each of the game's many servers, a system of auction houses lets between 15 and 30 thousand players trade goods they've acquired from killing monsters or manufactured from raw ingredients harvested from the world, all for the game's glibly-named currency, "gold." A casual network of barter and exchange thrives, filling players' screens with rapidly-scrolling want ads whenever they step into a major city. Player organizations, equipped with collective resources and shared goals, set up elaborate supply chains to funnel materials to experienced crafters for processing into ever more valuable items.
All this economic richness creates opportunities aplenty for the canny player. Commodities trading is a great place to start; the auction houses offer the perfect opportunity for wannabe day traders to play, away from the gaze of regulators and, of course, away from the risk of losing anything more than your virtual shirt. Assisted by custom-created, specialized user interfaces, the Warcraft trader pores over auction listings, watching price trends, studying supply levels and analyzing upcoming game tweaks in an attempt to be the first to spot a new opening.
WoW, Inc. - Video Game Feature - Yahoo! Video Games
