If you’ve got as many geeky friends as me you know how popular and addictive online gaming can be. Games like World of Warcraft, Guildwars, are noticing upto 7.5 million subscribers worldwide. Most notorious is a game called Second life – where you can literally build yourself a virtual life and convert real dollars into “linden” dollars to buy yourself property and your dream lifestyle.

This game recently came to the attention of “normal people” in the press, when it was revealed that Anshe Chung had become the games first millionaire by buying and selling virtual property on the game and converting linden dollars into real currency. Even giants such as IBM are setting up virtual offices and meeting inside the game – I guess it’s more fun than a regular business meeting.

According to Money Week if you want to cash in on the rise in popularity of such games without getting involved in the addictive and time consuming games themselves, you should invest in companies that stand to benefit. Companies in the East are gaining most from this sort of gaming, as the hobby is seeing its biggest surge in popularity in countries like china. The companies behind the game are good bets. Blizzard Entertainment are the creators of World of Warcraft also The9 has seen a huge rise in stock price thanks to owning the licence to the game, so get trading!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.