Virtual worlds, real profits

Spending your free time in a non-existent land pretending to be an elf may not be to everyone's taste, yet online role-play games are seriously big business. We seek out some of the best opportunities in the sector.

In the film The Matrix, the world we live in was revealed to be a computer-generated reality, developed to soak up the energies of its inhabitants. Now, with the advent of online games, the internet has spawned a series of Matrix-like alternative realities of its own.

The majority of these cumbersomely named massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), including the most popular World of Warcraft tend to involve taking on the guise of a character straight out of the pages of The Lord of the Rings, and then roaming around fantasy worlds, collecting treasure and killing monsters. While spending your spare hours wandering a non-existent land pretending to be a virtual elf might not be to everyone's taste, MMORPGs are big business World of Warcraft has more than 7.5 million subscribers worldwide. With each subscriber paying about $15 a month, that's a yearly cash take of $1.35bn. To put that into perspective, says The Weekly Standard, "in 2006, all of the movies released by Universal grossed about $800m at the box office".

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Eoin came to MoneyWeek in 2006 having graduated with a MLitt in economics from Trinity College, Dublin. He taught economic history for two years at Trinity, while researching a thesis on how herd behaviour destroys financial markets.