As uncertainty surrounds Venezuela’s political future, the ripples of change are being felt not just in Caracas but in the unusually complex economy of a decades-old browser-based game.
Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have logged on to Old School RuneScape (OSRS) not simply to play but to work. As hyperinflation hollowed out salaries and traditional jobs disappeared, Venezuelan players mined and collected valuable in-game resources and achieved coveted level 99 status in in-game skills, turning hours of gameplay into dollars or cryptocurrency.
The impact of Venezuelan players on the game’s internal economy was at one point so significant that local instability in the real world could upend the game’s internal marketplace. When blackouts hit or when Venezuelans fled the country in large numbers, prices inside OSRS would shift almost overnight.
As Venezuela’s trajectory shifts once again, OSRS serves as a reminder that the boundary between virtual and real economies isn’t as clear as it might seem—especially for players whose livelihoods depend on both.
RuneScape first launched in 2001 as a Java-based browser game created by the brothers Andrew and Paul Gower. The game combined simple mechanics with endless grind in a virtual world blending high fantasy with wry British humor. Unlike most other massively multiplayer online (MMO) games of its day, RuneScape could run on nearly any computer with a dial-up connection. A free-to-play option allowed kids to log on without having to hassle parents into paying a monthly subscription.
Trucking, bartering, and exchanging has always been an element of the game, with players buying and selling the commodities—lumber, ore, herbs—needed to achieve the coveted level 99 in each skill. While never intended as a core game mechanic, “playing” the economy rapidly emerged as a central joy of RuneScape. Players spontaneously organized bottom-up markets rivaling real-world markets in sophistication. Infamously, some people would even purchase in-game relationships, giving rise to the “buying gf” meme.
Misunderstanding the importance of this virtual economy, the game’s developer, Jagex, instituted economy-wide price controls and trade limits in 2008, hoping to curb the real-world sale of in-game gold. The update set off a wave of protests in virtual cities across RuneScape as players demanded the restoration of “free trade.” Jagex relented two years later, but the damage was done: The brief abolition of free trade—along with unpopular updates to combat mechanics and the introduction of “pay to win” mechanics—led many players to quit the game altogether.
The story of RuneScape might have ended there. Instead, the franchise now exists as two separate games. The original evolved into what players now call RuneScape 3, while in 2013—by popular demand—the developers revived a 2007-era version of the game known as Old School RuneScape.
The older version now has approximately 10 times the daily player count of the newer version. In 2025, OSRS surpassed a million paid members and reached more than 240,000 concurrent players, the highest peak in its history. (RuneScape 3, for comparison, gets about 30,000 concurrent players.)
Part of that endurance comes from OSRS‘ unusually democratic development model. Learning the lessons of the decline of RuneScape 3, Jagex allows players of OSRS to vote on new features, such that the player community plays an unusually large role in shaping the game’s evolution. But the marketplace plays an important role here too. RuneScape has never been just about completing quests or defeating bosses—it’s a complete virtual economy.
During the late 2010s, as hyperinflation devoured salaries and political turmoil hollowed out Venezuela’s formal labor market, many Venezuelans turned to OSRS—not to escape reality, but to survive it. Inside the game’s medieval fantasy world, players mined resources, defeated monsters, and accumulated virtual gold, which could be exchanged outside the game for U.S. dollars or cryptocurrency. The digital gold offered more stability than the bolívar, Venezuela’s official currency.
The shift reflected the scale of Venezuela’s collapse. Once one of South America’s wealthiest countries, Venezuela has undergone one of the most severe economic crises in modern history, triggering mass migration and widespread poverty. By 2019, independent surveys estimated that roughly 96 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty, with the majority unable to afford basic necessities.
As formal employment became less viable, many Venezuelans turned to digital work: freelance gigs, cryptocurrency mining, and online games with sophisticated economies.
OSRS was a particularly attractive option. The game’s low hardware requirements made it accessible even on aging computers, and its minimal data usage allowed players to operate despite slow internet speeds. Most importantly, the in-game currency had real-world value, even if selling in-game gold was technically a violation of the game’s terms of service.
“Over time my salary became less than four dollars a month,” one Venezuelan player told Polygon in 2019. “I decided to try a game my neighbor was telling me to play for money.” By “farming” RuneScape gold, the player earned hundreds of dollars each month, enough to help his family leave the country.
Farming has existed in online games for decades: Players accumulate virtual currency or valuable items and then sell them outside the game. But Venezuela brought both a new scale and a new motive to this old practice. With the bolívar losing value by the day, RuneScape gold became a more reliable store of value than local wages.
Other players shifted away from gold farming toward other activities, such as account leveling. Increasing a character’s agility from 1 to 99 (the highest level) can take more than a week of nonstop play, according to Jagex. For players with more cash than free time, paying someone else to undertake the infamously difficult grind to level 99 can be enticing—even if it is also a violation of the game’s terms of service.
A Venezuelan OSRS player, preferring to remain anonymous, tells Reason that he was working in I.T. in 2016, providing maintenance, repairs, and systems support. But the country’s economic collapse was reshaping his daily life and the value of his work. “At that time, the bolívar was basically worthless,” he says. “My salary didn’t even cover a week’s worth of groceries.”
That same year, he created an account on OSRS after hearing about it from friends. The game ran smoothly even with an unstable internet connection. When the company he worked for began scaling down operations and sending employees home early, he suddenly had more time. He already played MMOs as a hobby, so he adapted quickly.
“I played for several months, and when the company closed at the end of 2016, I started dedicating much more time to the game,” he says. He wasn’t chasing profit at first. While other players farmed in-game currency to sell, he focused on maxing out his account. But “when the crisis became more severe, I had to sell my account on a website….After completing the process, [the website] emailed me offering work doing services in OSRS on one of their servers.”
“There was a minimum deposit of $250 required to join, which I didn’t have—but they were buying my account for $350,” he recalls. “So I used part of my payment, $250 to be exact, in order to get in.” Soon he was defeating in-game bosses for pay and making “an amount that was very significant compared to my regular income.”
Finding a normal job was hard. “I’m a professional systems engineer, and salaries were extremely low,” he says. “I think the most I was offered in several interviews was $40 to $50 a month, which was very little considering I was earning much more money from the comfort of my home.”
Specialized marketplaces and intermediaries emerged to facilitate transactions, converting in-game assets into cash. Some players reportedly earned more than $300 a month—modest by global standards, but significantly more than many jobs in Venezuela paid at the height of hyperinflation.
RuneScape‘s fiercely competitive marketplace is shaped by supply and demand, like any real-world economy. When prices increased on a good—from dragon bones to Zulrah’s scales—Venezuelan players would spring into action and flood the market with more supply.
Yet the system was never fully legitimate. Real-world trading violates Jagex’s terms of service, and the company has long attempted to curb the practice. Former CEO Mark Gerhard once estimated that up to half of active players had purchased gold from third parties. Despite bans and enforcement efforts, many farmers simply create new accounts or operate through intermediaries.
Within the OSRS player community, the Venezuelan activity was always controversial: Many players grew frustrated with “vennies” overcrowding popular gold farming spots, such as green dragonhides, and violating the game’s prohibition on real-world trading. At the same time, many recognized that the game served as an economic lifeline for Venezuelan players. In more than one thread on r/2007scape, OSRS players debated the ethics of “player killing” Venezuelan players, with one player writing, “I know that they are just doing this to out [sic] food on the table for their families but it’s ruining the game and I can’t help it but feel a bit of Schadenfreude for it?”
For Venezuelans relying on the game, however, the greatest threat was not Jagex or other players but their own infrastructure. In March 2019, power outages swept across the country, leaving millions without electricity for days. Venezuela’s internet connectivity—already among the slowest in the world—collapsed alongside the electrical grid. For players who depended on consistent gameplay to earn income, the blackouts were devastating.
Inside OSRS, the effects were immediate: When thousands of Venezuelan players disappeared from servers, the supply of certain farmed items shrank. Nature rune trading volume—a pillar of the virtual economy—fell by half. Prices for commonly farmed commodities such as dragon bones and black chinchompas (a kind of weapon) fluctuated sharply, revealing how deeply the game’s economy had become intertwined with real-world labor conditions. Players suddenly experienced scarcity in items that had previously been abundant.
The RuneScape franchise is approaching its 25th anniversary amid renewed growth, while Venezuela’s trajectory remains uncertain. Some Venezuelan players have migrated to other MMOs, such as Tibia or World of Warcraft. Others have fully dedicated themselves to boosting accounts.
Today, Reason‘s Venezuelan source sees boosting—the practice of playing on behalf of others for pay in order to raise their ranks or skill levels—as a growing industry, especially among Venezuelan gamers navigating a fragile economy. “I know several friends who do the same,” he says.
“Some tasks pay a lot of money in a short time—it all depends on client demand,” he adds. “A job in Venezuela today might pay at most around $150 [a week] plus bonuses. With boosting, you can make over $500.”
On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military raided Caracas and captured dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife. They were taken to New York City and placed in federal custody to face drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump has framed this as the beginning of an effort to rebuild Venezuela’s economy and political system. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” he said at a press conference.
What sort of transition that will ultimately be is unclear. The Chavista regime remains in control of the country. Maduro’s longtime vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as interim president and has signaled willingness to cooperate with Washington. But her track record is almost as bad as Maduro’s. She oversaw much of the country’s feared intelligence service and has a long rap sheet of human rights violations.
If economic conditions in Venezuela change—through political shifts, new opportunities, or further instability—the consequence could again ripple through the OSRS marketplace. A sudden drop in Venezuelan players could once again reduce the supply of goods and send prices skyrocketing.
OSRS isn’t just a place for quests, community, and nostalgia. It’s a reminder that in a globalized world, the boundaries between work and play, between virtual and physical, are thinner than ever.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “In RuneScape, Venezuelans Can Have Economic Freedom.”
