i RMT'd full-time to put myself through school in the early 2000s across 4 games. my first internship was for an RMT company. i eventually started my own gold selling site and sold it in 2010 to my partner and bought my first house at 25, almost entirely with pretend video game money. i fuckin' ruled as a capitalist pig and i loved MMOs so it was a dream job, but it was horrendously exploitative and all this donald trump bringing jobs back here shit is bullshit, through and through.
a chinese 'gold farm' in 2001 was around US $6k a month and that got you 10 farmers (12 hr shifts, 5 on 5 off) a personal chef for them, ALL THEIR ROOM AND BOARD paid for (they lived at the 'farm') and an english-speaking supervisor. this was very early on in the industry and things are much different and more advanced now, but i almost dropped out of school to move to China because the money was so, so good. and this was back in the day before the huge account selling sites and buyer-seller aggregates like EPICNPC and Ownedcore and long before auction house addons like TSM made afk grinding millions of gold pretty easy. all my guys ever did was grind elites in the plaguelands.
at age 18 in 1999 when RMT was still OK on eBay, i think i did about $88k in revenue in Ultima Online alone! my parent's accountants that i used for free (yay for my privs!) had a lot of trouble figuring out just what to do with the piles of money i was making on the grey market using IPs i had no rights to whatsoever.
paying for 14 employees, all their office expenses, all their food, housing, utilities etc. for only 6k USD a month... there is just no way the USA will ever be able to compete with that without the price of what we consume here rising massively, and we all know everyone hates rising prices.
there are a lot of pros and cons to RMT and it is a fascinating industry that helped shape multiplayer gaming, for better or worse. a game is only as good as its RMT industry. demand for your game's currency says a lot about the success of a title today. even blizzard has given up fighting it.
now about half of the industry is shamelessly black hat. hacking and stripping accounts for a lot of sold currency, and exploit communities routinely grow powerful enough to hold game studios hostage. EverQuest's progression servers for example are almost entirely RMT-driven. without RMT, the game would've sunset years ago.