WB: 100000 outsourced gamers
By Bala Shah

infoDev is a tech and innovation led development finance program in the Financial and Private Sector Development Vice Presidency of The World Bank (WB). infoDev is coordinated and served by an expert Secretariat. A new study by the infoDev program shows that virtual online currencies and digital work now provide real income to poor and unskilled workers in developing countries.

One excerpt of the report shows as many as 100 thousand gamers in China and Vietnam provide their services to people in USA and Europe

“
In contrast, entrepreneurial opportunities in the virtual economy of digital scarcities have sometimes been successfully exploited, even with limited skills and infrastructure. A prominent example of this is the third-party gaming services industry. An estimated 100,000 young, low-skilled workers in countries such as China and Vietnam earn their primary income by harvesting virtual resources and providing player-for-hire services in popular online games such as World of Warcraft. The demand for these services comes from millions of wealthier players who have a serious interest in the game world and the social connections it facilitates, but lack the time (and patience) to reach far into the game alone.

The gross revenues of the third-party gaming services industry were approximately $3.0 billion in 2009, most of which was captured in the developing countries where these services were produced.
“

The report has a number of references to India. “There are no comprehensive studies of the demographics of microworkers, but a partial picture can be constructed by examining the demographics of the workers of individual work aggregators. Ipeirotis (2008, 2010) has conducted surveys to examine the workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk, colloquially known as “turkers”. In 2008, 76 percent of the respondents were from the United States and 8 percent from India. In 2010, the proportion of U.S. respondents has fallen to 47 percent and Indians have increased to 34 percent. The remaining 19 percent are from 66 different countries. This change probably reflects the fact that in 2008, Amazon only channeled payments to U.S. bank accounts, whereas it recently also started to channel payments to India.”