Unpacking China’s Out-of-Game Economy

What is your game time worth? My answer is about RMB 7.29 an hour, a little over $1.

Fantasy Westward Journey is NetEase’s decades-old, turn-based MMORPG. Between January 23 and February 23 of this year, I made a total of RMB 1,028.95 (~$143) with 25 currency transactions, all on NetEase’s own trading platform Cangbaoge. After deducting game billing — namely, prepaid point cards for billing game time, which cost RMB 300 (~$42) — my take-home total was RMB 728.95 (~$101) across five accounts running side by side for 100 hours of my own time, an hourly rate of RMB 7.29 ($1+).

Nothing about that month was illicit, and none of it happened out of NetEase’s sight. For an aged live-service product with an out-of-game economy around it, that economy could either be regulated into the sun or lost to third-party middlemen, neither desirable. Hence, NetEase built Cangbaoge to regulate its currency, item, and account trading, both to avoid losing its cut and to curb third-party scams. Every transaction incurs a commission of 8–10%.

The reason virtual item and currency trading could be made into an industry, albeit gray, is that items, gear, gold, and accounts all reside in databases owned by publishers, where they could be restricted, banned, taxed, monitored, or flagged. Human services, on the other hand, exist in gray-market shops, unaccountable to anyone but the workers. In China, the human services gray market for games employs more than one million workers.

Of course, in the West, Valve’s Steam Community Market works in a similar fashion with virtual goods, but that is a marketplace for items bolted onto specific titles. There was also the web3 gaming craze that led to all sorts of trading, but it completely fell apart due to weak games and poor economy designs. What is unusual about China is both the scale of virtual item sales and the size of the adjacent gaming human-services market.

Together, virtual item trading and human services form an out-of-game economy around games. The former is billable and often regulated and implemented by publishers themselves, whereas the latter remains fully gray. Juggling what’s controllable versus what isn’t has become a larger topic for Chinese publishers to sort out.

The Rise of Human Services

In the extraction shooter Delta Force, a human services gray market has emerged around its Operations mode — where players lose all looted items upon death. Because player-to-player trading is unavailable, an alternative economy emerged to fill the void.

Taxing these human services is nearly impossible for Delta Force given their gray-market nature. Outright bans are equally difficult to enforce: these third-party providers essentially function as in-game companions, escorts, or farmers, performing standard gameplay labor until an account actually transfers hands.

Such services are categorized into three types:

• Green: playing the game normally, at RMB 300–400 an hour ($42–56)
• Red: blatantly cheating, at 60% to 70% of green’s price, yet tripling the loot
• Green performance: resorting to cheating while concealing it

Roughly 70% of these service requests target specific maps known for lucrative item drops. Rather than utilizing in-game channels, third-party service providers predominantly market their offerings through WeChat mini-programs.

For instance, the third-party outfit Tianba Club offers a currency-farming package priced at RMB 238 (~$33) for 12.88M in-game currency, a substantial sum within Delta Force.

By comparison, Genshin Impact strictly prohibits both account transfers and player-to-player trading, effectively curtailing the trade of virtual goods while leaving human-provided services largely unaffected.

Big and Getting Bigger

The bigger half of China’s out-of-game economy centers on trading. The main forms of gray-market trading are gold sales in MMORPGs, account sales in live-service games, and item sales in extraction shooters.

According to Guanyan Tianxia, in 2023 China’s out-of-game virtual-item trading market drove a whopping RMB 74.25B (~$10.3B) in volume. This market has grown alongside China’s game market. In the first half of 2025, China’s virtual-item trading market was worth RMB 44.73B (~$6.2B), up 12.74% YoY, while China’s game market saw RMB 168B (~$23.3B) in revenue, up 14.08% YoY. Notably, transactions conducted outside of games are a bit over a quarter of those conducted within them.

When we compare these figures to the RMB 3.34B (~$460M) generated in third-party account boosting services in 2023, it’s clear that boosting is a tiny sector of China’s gaming gray economy (less than 5% of measured transactions) compared to the goods-based market. In that same time period, gear, currency, and consumables accounted for more than 90% of items being traded on third-party platforms.

It’s important to keep in mind that most of the boosting and other services being bought and sold don’t happen on third-party trading platforms where orders are measured and fees are charged. Jiaoyimao, for instance, charges 6% of the order’s value or a maximum of RMB 1,000, ~$139, whichever is lower. Since a large amount of activity happens in WeChat through mini-programs and other means that evade measurement, it’s impossible to say how large the business is there and how much the measured statistics undercount it.

Another gray market sector is companion-play, which generated more than RMB 10B (~$1.4B) in volume in 2024 — all of it outside publishers’ reach.

The Attempt to Control

Does all of this out-of-game economic activity eat into publisher revenue? The answer depends on who owns the marketplace for item sales, but publishers haven’t been able to tax human services.

My experience as a currency seller has been on NetEase’s official trading platform Cangbaoge, which charges an 8–10% fee to transfer currency from one account to another. If you sell currency on an alternative marketplace like DD373, those fees never make their way to NetEase. But for Fantasy Westward Journey, it hardly matters who’s paying for that currency, because the classic PC game’s business model is still based on time-based subscriptions (usually monthly or even hourly). However, the ability to resell items for real-world currency has become an integral part of Fantasy Westward Journey’s gameplay, and Cangbaoge has become a core part of NetEase’s Fantasy Westward Journey monetization strategy.

In the case of World of Warcraft gold in China, Leihuo (the NetEase subsidiary responsible for operating and publishing the game in China) can control how much of it exists by tinkering with a couple of variables, and DD373’s gold selling hurts them since that’s money they should be making. In February of 2025, they added the WoW Token to the anniversary servers, a means of officially trading WoW currency for real money by allowing players to purchase tokens through Blizzard’s store to sell on the auction house for gold.

There’s also a difference between a publisher’s terms and legality. Cangbaoge allows currency trading and will take a cut of the action; 5173 and DD373 facilitate currency selling in violation of publishers’ ToS, but the players don’t break any laws by using these third-party platforms. In fact, these third-party platforms have adopted policies around deposits, real-name authentication, and more stringent auditing for merchants hoping to offer a buyback service.

New Problems

Even if third-party item trading operates legally, government scrutiny remains focused on unauthorized account sharing. When accounts are transferred to external parties, real-name registration and anti-addiction rules are rendered ineffective because game operators can no longer verify player identities.

Tencent actively addressed this by joining China’s first boosting-as-unfair-competition lawsuit. In 2023, the Shanghai Pudong Court ruled in Tencent’s favor, awarding Tencent RMB 985,000 (~$137,000) in damages.

Despite these legal precedents, in-game escorting continues to thrive in Delta Force. However, players who utilize boosting services face risks. If an account is damaged or compromised, customer support from both game publishers and boosting platforms will refuse assistance, as the practice violates both parties’ ToS. CCTV News highlighted these risks in March 2026, reporting on account damage caused by boosters, noting that more than 3,000 related complaints had been logged on the consumer platform Black Cat.

Account sharing also degrades matchmaking quality by introducing players who do not match their account’s recorded skill profile, which can harm genuine player engagement.

Publishers gain no direct financial benefit from boosting, as it all occurs “in somewhat of an underground market.” Conversely, companion play — where the client maintains full account control — is recognized as a legitimate business model. Formal standards have been established by industry groups: the Esports Branch of the China Communications Industry Association issued guidelines for companion-play services, while the Shanghai Esports Association developed a certification for esports coaching. In this adjacent field, paid players instruct clients rather than playing on their behalf, and about 40,000 people have earned certification in the field.

Game operators have also taken technical measures against unauthorized farming. In December 2025, Chinese World of Warcraft operator Leihuo nerfed gold drops from trash mobs in dungeons and enacted a 30-minute cap to curb multi-character gold farming. However, thousands of unauthorized gold listings for Chinese WoW servers remain active on platforms like DD373. This contrasts with Western servers, where an outright ban went into effect in February 2024, during Season of Discovery.

Regulatory oversight of virtual property is also strengthening. In September 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court published a set of guidelines and exemplary cases on virtual property. One featured ruling targeted a third-party platform that facilitated currency sales from unclear sources. The platform was ordered to halt transactions and pay RMB 3.03M (about $421,000) to the copyright holder. Rather than outlawing currency trading or opening unrestricted markets, the ruling established that third-party platforms are legally accountable for screening listed items.

This shifting legal framework presents an opportunity for publishers to introduce proprietary trading platforms that allow players to trade safely within legal and ToS boundaries. Gray areas persist, and they are unlikely to disappear from mature, high-profile titles. However, through legal precedents, industry associations, and regulatory frameworks, these secondary markets are increasingly being brought into the official fold.

What’s Next?

China’s out-of-game economy will keep growing, and regulation will likely be a tailwind. The item market has already established its compliance path, and the service market is gradually moving the same way. Whereas unverifiable account sharing will remain problematic, the rise of companion play and coaching is fully legitimate.

Publishers are unlikely to crack down on third-party item selling any time soon, but given the size of the trading economy, the incentives exist for publishers to build more and better marketplaces (like Cangbaoge) to better compete. In other words, incorporating an out-of-game economy — and figuring out how to best support it — is a growing design consideration that touches millions of people and billions of dollars. Perhaps the gray market will never be fully tamed, but its activity can be better captured.

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In Other News

Funding and M&A:

• General Intuition raises $220M at $6.2B valuation
• Embracer secures $200M revolving credit facility
• Trophy Games has agreed a deal to acquire French game developer Playrion from Paradox Interactive for an upfront cash consideration of €2.25M ($2.6M)
• US-based mobile games developer Topdog has raised $2.5M
• China-based games developer Feijiu Technology has raised an undisclosed sum from Lilith Games and another investor
• US-based VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners has closed $5.75B across two funds: $1.75B for Seed and early-stage investments and $4.0B for growth

Business & Product:

• Global game content revenue forecast to rise 2.3% to $229.1B in 2030, supported by PC and Asia-Pacific market
• My.Games’ Hunting Rivals surpasses $3M revenue and 3M installs
• Ubisoft brings Creative House 2 together under Massive Entertainment
• Xbox CEO Asha Sharma insists “Xbox is not for sale”
• MTG wants to double its size while leveraging AI
• YouTube Playables expands to more than 50 markets including the EU and Nordics

Miscellaneous:

• Valve is updating Steam’s Discount & Events section to become more “dynamic and personalised”
• Minion Rush to end online services in January 2027
• The Witcher 3 hits its highest-ever Steam concurrent player count following Remastered launch
• How Brazil’s games industry is building its global future
• Minecraft World to open in UK with world-first hotel and rollercoaster

Content Worth Consuming

Dune Awakening’s Creative Director on Copying Hollywood, In-Game Advertising, and Why Style Beats Photorealism (gamesindustry.biz): “The fun thing about making a game based on a big movie property is that you get to hobnob with Hollywood royalty. The bad news is that it’s through Jira. Joel Bylos, chief creative officer at Funcom, explains that while making Dune Awakening, the studio had to run various things by Legendary, the company behind the Dune movies. ‘We submit things to Jira, they approve within a certain amount of time,’ he explains, namedropping the widely used project-management software that’s either an absolute godsend or a relentless destroyer of joy, depending on your personal point of view.”

As a Battlefield Studio, is Criterion Games Really Still Criterion? (The Game Business): “We chat with four leaders from EA's Criterion studio about how it made Battlefield with three other international studios, and whether the studio is still the same one that made those Need for Speed and Burnout games.”

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls with Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Reed Baird and Marvel Games’ Michael Francisco (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Jun Shen Chia chats with Michael Francisco, Senior Product Development Manager, Marvel Games and Reed Baird, Senior Producer, SIE PlayStation Studios XDEV. Together they discuss the development of MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls including how the project was first envisioned and when they began working with Arc System Works; the process of designing a character and importance of representing their story within their move set; and pioneering a 4 vs 4 tag team fighter that's balanced with both casual and competitive players in mind.”

An Ode to Final Fantasy ft. Peter Broderick & The White Mages (GXM Podcast): “On this week’s episode of GXM, we sit down with Erased Tapes artist Peter Broderick to discuss his latest project, Ode to Final Fantasy, a tribute album that celebrates his favourite tracks from the Final Fantasy video games. Broderick’s own music origin story began with the Final Fantasy series. As a child, he was obsessed with Final Fantasy VII. His mother, the poet Selah Broderick, promised she’d gift him a PlayStation if he practiced the violin for 100 days in a row. An eager young Broderick took his mother up on this offer, and as he improved on the violin, he was given the PlayStation as promised. In his own words, ‘I learned to play music because of my drive to play video games’.”

Istanbul Is the University of Puzzles: Dream, Grand, Loom & the Founder Factory (two & a half gamers): “Turkey went from zero gaming news for five years to producing the most consistent hit-making machine in mobile, and in this episode we sit down with Batuhan Avucan, founder of Mobidictum, to find out how that actually happened and what's coming next. The short version: investors gave Turkish founders one mandate, puzzle, and Turkish founders executed. The Sort category alone went from basically nothing in 2023 to roughly $80M a month in IAP, and once you add ad revenue on top it's easily $120M a month, spearheaded by Pixel Flow, Magic Sort, Hexa Sort and friends.”

SecretSauce Labs’ Simon Davis on Leaving Games Behind and Solving AI’s Brand Consistency Problem (pocketgamer.biz): “Wearemighty is leaving game development behind and rebranding as SecretSauce Labs, shifting its focus entirely to AI content technology after three years spent developing tools to solve a production problem that began inside games. The company, previously known as Mighty Bear Games before becoming wearemighty in January 2026, developed games including Disney Melee Mania, Mighty Action Heroes and Butter Royale. It now focuses on helping brands produce content at scale while maintaining consistency across advertising, social media, and product content.”

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