The dream job is ideally one that you get paid for doing something you love. It’s safe to assume that many a gamer has dreamt of being paid for the hours spent playing their favorite games. The truth is you can indeed make money with playing video games.
Remember, if it were easy to become rich from playing video games, there would be a lot more rich people in the world. Just like with anything else, earning an income from gaming takes time and most of all, skill. Here are the top 5 steps to make money gaming.
Gold Farming
Inside of every MMORPG there is usually a currency system that you can work inside of. You can buy and sell items for the game’s currency type, allowing you to grow your character. While this is the way for players to move along in the game, there is a market for finding “gold” and selling it for real-world money.
This is known as “gold farming” and can be very lucrative, depending on your skill and time to invest into the game. For example, in World of Warcraft, you can go on raids and collect dropped items for sale, along with finding gold along the way. Selling these for actual cash is a great way to help fund your online gaming needs.
Test Games
One of the reasons a game is usually totally polished and working perfectly when you buy it is thanks to a team of game testers. It is the responsibility of these testers to find any issues with the game before it is launched.
Don’t think this is like you sitting down for a gaming session with friends, however. Game testing can be very tedious and rarely do you get to play a game you really enjoy. Basically a game tester’s job is to try and break the game and document the testing in extreme detail.
Long hours, repetitive work, and average pay await most game testers, but if you love everything about video games, it can still be a very rewarding job knowing you’re helping to make video games rock-solid for players around the world.
Virtual Market Investing
With detailed financial ecosystems forming in online games, it’s no wonder that virtual markets exist. The best example of this would be the official stock market inside of the game Second Life, called the LindeX. This allows for the purchase and sale of virtual stocks and with $31.5 million traded in Q1 2011, this is a real way to make money.
Along with virtual markets like this, you can make purchases on venture ideas like upgrades to the game and possible necessary items. If you believe that certain types of armor will be hard to get, or if you find very rare items, you can keep these until their value increases to a point that you make a nice profit. In this way, game markets are VERY similar to the real world and its easy to see how you can make real money.
Write Tutorial Guides
This is a great way to make money from gaming that is technically outside of the game itself. If you have above average skills at a specific game, you can document how you beat the game and compile this into a guide you can sell.
E-book sales are on the rise, so writing an E-book guide for a new and popular video game is a great way to capitalize on the buzz surrounding a new game while getting to play it.
Blog About Games
The last way to make money playing video games in this list is to write for a blog or website about video games. If you love video games and always keep up to date on the latest gaming news and releases, they it only makes sense that you could write about it and make money doing it.
There are a lot of ways to make money writing or blogging. You could start your own blog and rent out ad space, sell the tutorials mentioned in #4 above, or you could apply to write for an existing blog or gaming website. Whatever you choose, if you have excellent writing skills and love video games, this can be the perfect way to make money playing games.
Wrap-Up
There are many more ways to make money playing video games than those listed above, but this is a great list of the easiest ways. Remember, anything you are paid to do will not be fun all of the time. It’s like working for a brewery; it’s not all drinking and partying. There are a lot of late hours and early mornings and an enormous amount of dedication.
If you love games, though, one of these ways might be your ticket into the video game industry.
