Posts tagged archives

Why does money spent in the multiplayer gameget sent to a Hong Kong company connected with one in the Marshall Islands – where you find banking secrecy and zero taxation?

We return to the issue of Evony, the online multiplayer game. You’ll recall our story – Has Evony become the most despised company on the web? – which looked at how the game (free to join, potentially expensive to play) had annoyed a number of people because people had spammed links to it on blogs, the advertising seemed misleading (there are no large heaving boobs in the game) and when it was still called Civony (in May 2009), some of the images in the advertising were actually taken from other sources without acknowledgement.

Bruce Everiss, a 30-year veteran of the UK games industry, has posted a series of blogposts on his bruceongames.com site since last summer in which he has claimed that Evony, the game, previously had links to a Chinese company, UMGE, and that that was linked to a Chinese “gold farming” business – which gets low-paid workers to earn virtual money in online games such as World of Warcraft, and then sells it (against WoW’s rules) to other players. (Puzzled about gold farming? We went inside a company that does it.)

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