Would You Buy This Ring For $6000? Inside China's Biggest E-Commerce Platform for Virtual Items

Games don’t make money in China if you try to charge money for them up front. $60 for the latest Call of Duty? Chinese gamers aren’t having it. But that doesn’t mean they don’t spend money — lots of money — on games. In the last week alone, one Chinese gamer spent more than $6,000 on the ring-and-jade set pictured above. The top ten transactions on 5173, China’s largest platform for buying and selling in-game virtual items, added up to more than $24,000. And that’s just the top ten from one platform last week alone.

And that wasn’t a particularly surprising or extraordinary week. Looking back over the past year, the top deals for game items on 5173 have hit similar heights almost every week. At lot of these items come from DNF, which isn’t a huge surprise given that it’s the second most popular PC game in China. Of course, the average gamer isn’t spending thousands of dollars on digital armor, but sellers on 5173 offer plenty of cheaper items, too, and many Chinese gamers do spend money on this sort of thing.

5173 is an e-commerce platform for virtual gaming items. It offers items for a variety of games on a number of different platforms, and the prices for the rarest and most-sought-after items can get sky high. Given that, it’s probably not hard to see why the vast majority of China’s game developers adopt a “freemium” model that relies on users paying money for in-game items. 9Devs are out of the loop on 5173, which is a third-party market somewhat like Taobao that allows independent sellers to list their own items, but if users are willing to pay for in-game items on a third party platform they’re most likely willing to make some in-game payments, too.)

If you’re interested in tracking the top deals and currency fluctuations on 5173, QQ Games keeps a helpful weekly-updated list here, although to see it each week you’ll have to change the dates in the URL manually as the front page hasn’t been updated in some time.