A $3 billion industry was built on people playing video games 12 hours a day and it got so profitable that Chinese prisons forced inmates to do it too

Gold farming is grinding the same repetitive tasks in online games to earn in game currency, then selling it to Western players who'd rather pay cash than spend hundreds of hours leveling up
An American kid could buy a million WoW gold for $30 and that money went straight to whoever was farming it
By 2005 China had over 100,000 full time gold farmers and eighty percent of all gold farming worldwide was happening in China
By 2009 the industry was generating over $3 billion a year
Entire buildings in cities like Changsha and Nanjing were converted into farming floors with rows of young men playing games around the clock
They would sleep in on site dormitories, working twelve hour shifts seven days a week for roughly $145 a month
One operation in Changsha had 300 workers and was actively hiring for 500
The supply chain ran like a factory. Chinese workers farmed the gold, brokers collected it, websites listed it in English, Western players paid through PayPal and the gold was delivered in game within hours
But the darkest version of this operation wasn't in a warehouse. It was in a prison
Liu Dali was a prison guard himself before he got locked up in 2004 for reporting corruption in his hometown and got sent to the Jixi labor camp in northeast China
During the day he broke rocks and dug trenches while at night he played World of Warcraft not by choice
Three hundred inmates were forced to play online games in 12 hour shifts and the computers never turned off
One group finished, the next sat down and kept going
The guards at Jixi were clearing 5,000 to 6,000 RMB a day, roughly $900, and the inmates saw nothing
The math was simple: a prisoner breaking rocks made the prison a few dollars a day but a prisoner farming WoW gold made ten times that with no material costs and no equipment
Miss your quota and you got beat. Liu said they forced him to stand with his hands above his head for hours and when he got back to his dormitory the guards hit him with plastic pipes. He said they kept playing until they could barely see things
The guards looked at 300 inmates and saw free labor producing real money inside a fake world where the workers couldn't log off
Blizzard banned millions of accounts, sued the selling websites and built detection systems but none of it mattered
As long as a Western player's time was worth more than a Chinese worker's labor the market couldn't die
Liu said it was happening across multiple prisons in northeast China and he believes it never stopped
A $3 billion industry where the average worker made $145 a month and in places like Jixi the workers made nothing at all