Mafia Wars

Some math on Mafia Wars...fair warning: Geek alert.

So, Mafia Wars on Facebook. The Reward points you earn in the game can be used to buy other goods, including in-game money. You can also pay real US dollars for reward points, making it possible to develop a conversion factor between the two.

At today's rates:

You can puchase reward points at the rate of 42 for 8 dollars...

42 Reward pts / 8 US Dollars = 5.25 R pts / USD

And you can purchase in-game money as follows...

206000 MF$ / 10 R pts

Allowing for a calculation of an exchange rate between in-game money and out of game money...

206000 MF$ / 10 R pts = 108150 MF$ / USD

Okay, so, so far we seen some interesting stuff, but I'm sure you're asking yourself, "Damn Dave, you need to get out more." You're probably right, but the point to all this is the following:

Since I can also earn in-game money by playing the game, I can reverse this calculation and find out how much my in game money is worth in real dollars. This means that if I could sell my in-game dollars at the same rate they sell them to us at, I would have...

900,000,000 MF$ * 1 / 108150 USD/MF$ = 8321USD (rounded)

...over 8000 dollars in the real world. Not bad for for the spare time I've put into the game while checking facebook.

You may have heard of this in other games where people really are doing this: Link