Mogmine - In depth
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Mogmine is a small currency seller with two-years operating experience.
The company offers sales of virtual currency as well as other
specialized services like power, skill and reputation leveling, taking
people to quests and instances and other special orders. The company
was founded late 2005 by Jason and Brian, though Brian Lim as of now
has left the company. Currently their website has undergone some
improvement effort and is in beta stage. A unique feature of the
website is the power leveling calculator which customers can use to
calculate the cost of leveling up their characters as well as how long
it will take.
The company is well under the radar, positioned at
800,920
in Alexa`s web traffic ranking. This can be explained with its absence
from popular search engines. Searching for popular keywords such as
`WoW gold` will not produce any result relevant to the company. A
decent search result is `reputation leveling` where the website appears
at position 16 in Google.
Mogmine also operates another currency selling site -
Mogmasters - whose
Alexa ranking is even lower at
1,352,579.
As at July 5, 2007
We caught up with Jason for a short interview.
Can you give us some background, what you do and how the
company got started? How would you describe a typical owner of a gold
farming or selling business?
I own part of the company and am the one in charge of operations of the
business, which started up roughly two years ago with a friend of mine
who I met online. Our original plan was to open up an ESL (English as a
Second Language) school in Asia, but our plans changed after talking
about other types of businesses that we could do together. Despite of
all the money I hear is floating around in this industry, competition
seems to be stiff and seems to be growing at a back breaking pace.
Because of that, most gold farming or selling businesses I`ve spoken to
seem to be running just enough to stay afloat.
I`ve noticed a banner down the page of Mogmine saying it is
powered by VCExchange. Can you elaborate the relationship between
Mogmine and VCExchange? Other domains that you`re running?
Mogmine sells virtual currency and services to customers as a retailer
just like your IGEs and Swagvaults out there. Mogmine is operated and
managed by VCExchange. VCExchange works more in the secondary market
offering virtual currency and services to other retailers who are
looking for quality, reliability and accountability in this virtual
industry where nobody sees each other. We plan on opening up new sites
in hopefully the near future.
Please give us an idea the size of your operations. Do you
employ your own farmers or do you only act as a distributor or broker?
To protect the interests of our partners and our business, I can`t go
into detail about the size of our operations. What I can tell you
though, as I mentioned before, is that we work with gamers and do gold
trading at the same time.
As one of the few US-operated currency sellers, how would you
like to describe your company and what sets it apart from others?
I think the unique thing about our company is that it is an American
operated company based in Asia. I am an American who packed everything
up and moved to Asia to start-up this company. My assistant and HR
officer, is also an American from Los Angeles, California. What is
unique about our company and what makes it stand out from other
American run businesses is that our operations aren`t thousands of
miles away from us. It allows us to manage things better and address
any problem that goes on a lot more quickly and efficiently than others
can.
What are your thoughts on news reports about `chinese gold
farmer sweatshops` and does it have any effect on you in terms of
competition with lower cost of farming in China?
The reports on Gold farming in Asia don`t bother me so much as I think
the American media really likes to blow things out of proportion. I
don`t know how one can compare working in an office playing video games
to working in a clothes factory or manufacturing factory where the
working conditions are poor and somebody can get seriously injured.
Farming companies that I know and work with don`t hold anybody against
their will. If a gamer feels that this isn`t the job for them, they are
free to leave and find another job.
If there is any farming and selling gold in America, I`m pretty much
convinced that the people are using a botting program. Asides from
that, I think the rest of farming comes from other developing
countries. All retailers that I know buy most of their gold from China.
More gamers are complaining about in-game spam from gold
selling companies. Do you think there are other ways to promote and
advertise?
I think that Blizzard did a good job with their tactics to stop in-game
spamming as you rarely see it nowadays compared to previous months. I
don`t agree with in-game marketing. We only market ourselves to people
who want to or would consider using a service like ours. There are
those who take a hard stance and wouldn`t visit a site like ours. We
leave those people alone.
Following on the previous question, I have noticed your
ranking with Alexa and search engine are far behind other competitors.
How do you get customers to your sites?
Our budget compared to competitors and the traffic we get is much
smaller, but we`re working on changing that. A lot of the business that
we get are through word of mouth and the budget we allot for marketing.
How would you describe your relationship with game operators?
What has changed for you over the last two years given the increased
reports about counter-measures employed by companies like Blizzard? Can
you share your worst experience with a game company?
We haven`t had any problems with any game companies.
What is your outlook for the future of RMT? What will we get
to see in the next few years?
I don`t see this industry going away anytime soon as long as there are
working professionals with families who want to enjoy more fun parts of
the game rather than use their free time to do boring parts of the game
that require a lot of grinding.
I`m not sure about the American market, but I can see a possibility of
European and Asian markets embracing RMT and trying to make something
work just like what SOE has done with EQ2. There are already smaller
games in Asia where RMT is an open thing and items are sold and
purchased directly from the game makers themselves.
