Older Players Spur Growth of Power-Leveling

Power-leveling is attracting increased interest these days, according to an informative story by Daniel Terdiman of C/Net that mentions many of the sites featured in the directory of power-leveling services at Virtual Economies. The growing demand for power leveling services is driven by the expansion of World of Warcraft, which makes it even more daunting for new players to advance to the highest levels of the game.

According to Power-levels.com, it takes a new player 768 hours to reach the highest level you can hit in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. For someone who had already topped out at level 60 in the original WoW, it would take 384 hours to get to the new top level of 70 in Burning Crusade. Several provders of paid power-leveling told C/Net that their business has been on the rise:

Outfits like Guy4Game, Power-levels.com, Power-level.net and GmLvl.com say they’re pulling in serious business. For example, GmLvl.com says on its Web site that it employs more than 2,000 people solely for the purpose of helping clients get where they want to be. By comparison, Guy4Game’s has a staff of 150 full-time workers.

Daniel notes that power-leveling services may be getting new customers due to eBay’s decision to halt the of auction of game accounts. The availability of high-level accounts on eBay made it simple for players to reach level 60 in the time it takes to process a Paypal transaction. Power-leveling is an alternate route to the upper levels, in which a service charges a fee to quickly advance a character to the desired level:

“They give us their character name, their password and they tell us which level they want us to reach for them,” said Flora Chen, manager of Guy4Game, a power-leveling company based in Canada that also has operations in China, Korea, Japan and Mexico. “Some just want to reach levels as fast as possible, so they say to (play for them) 24 hours a day.”

The process typically involves two players from the power-leveling service working together, with one player using an existing high-level character while the other one uses the client account. As the C/Net story notes, power-leveling is controversial because it violates the terms of service of many games (which prohibit the sharing of account logins) and is frowned upon by many gamers:

In the eyes of regular players, however, those who utilize power-leveling services aren’t sticking to the spirit of the games. “Using a service to level a character is pretty universally regarded as a ‘lamer’ move,” said Eric Haller, a San Francisco investor and long-time WoW player. “You will definitely not earn anyone’s respect if they know you have paid for your levels.”

But the growth of the power-leveling industry underscores a key point about the demographics of MMORPG gaming. As the player base has expanded beyond hard-core young adults, many new players are older and have careers and families - leaving less time available for grinding through levels. Sony’s recent white paper on the Station Exchange economy noted that the largest sellers were 22-year-olds (who have plenty of time but not a lot of money) and the largest buyers were age 34. These older players have more money than time, and that fact drives the demand side of the virtual economy, creating a sustainable and thriving market for both power-leveling and game accounts.