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Virtual Real Estate Boom Draws Real Dollars
An anonymous reader writes "According to a USAToday story, Second Life from Linden Labs is seeing a boom in virtual land trading. The article quotes a player as saying: 'My vision is to buy real estate in Second Life with one or two other investors and make it available to new players as a business', and it seems that 'Large swathes of undeveloped online property, some bearing an uncanny resemblance to a palm-studded West Coast beachfront idyll, are selling for up to $550 an acre.' Second Life uses OpenGL and Ogg-Vorbis running on a Linux grid." S!: We've previously covered Second Life on several occasions over at Slashdot Games.
I ask my fellow /.-ers, why? Why waste your money on "virtual real estate"? Are we all really this stupid?....
Or is this spam gone wrong?
My MythTV HowTo
...that I wish I was stupid enough to have thought up first.
It's good to see a company that's finally willing to work _with_ players and what they want. With the other games, especially EQ, the company claims you have no right to sell your virtual creations. If that's what players want to do, then let them.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Society has finally reached so low that it has forced us to created an alternative virtual world to live in. People are so depressed about their own lifes and desire material wealth, so they go out and buy this game, pay $10 a month to play it, and then pay what is essencially real money as a 'tax' on their *virtual* property?
At least EQ and UO and the breed somewhat hide the fact that it's an escapist environment by calling it a 'mmorpg'. This 'game' is called 'second life'??? I would imagine that people with these second lives could better spend the time improving their first ones.
http://www.freepokerchipset.info
Since the "real estate" is virtual, how do you:
a) Know that you are getting what you pay for? $550/acre, how do I confirm that I'm getting a whole acre? This becomes more of an issue with bigger chunks - what if my 100-acre plot is really only 80 acres?
and in a similar vein
b) What does it mean to own an "acre" of "land" that doesn't actually exist? If it's purely virtual, how can there be a shortage of land? Can something with a literally infinate supply be a commodity like REAL land is?
I suppose (b) sorta cancels (a) out to some degree, but it's stupid to pay for something that you cannot verify what you're actually buying, is in infinate supply (at least in theory) and otherwise holds no intrinsic value...
=Smidge=
See that bridge, why don't you go on it and jump off ?
yeah, right...
I have my well worn and pages folded book of animals...er...real estate right here in my pocket :-)
in an effort to fantasize on some level
I think this really is the main point and what I would tend to believe. It is the same logic as Flight Simulators where I can not go buy or even rent an F-16 or A-10 but I can play on the game level and get a really big kick out of it. Obviously the difference is that I would not pay (other than for the software perhaps) to fly said airplane.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I ask my fellow /.-ers, why? Why waste your money on "virtual real estate"? Are we all really this stupid?....
;)
I've been tinkering around with second life. You have to own land to have more objects. The more objects you build the more land you must own. If you own a store, you must own enough land to support all the objects you have on display.
Also, land is where you can build your virtual house/store/castle/etc. And people can charge to use it or buy things from you when you are no there.
I have not spent any real money other than the monthly service contract. I was lucky enough to get a good piece of land when someone sold a nice plot next to water.
BTW, lots of people tinker around in Second life due to the programmer, 3d artist features. While you can just go around and chat, you can also build and sell, or a nice combination of both.
I'm glad they are building up ingame communications, like radio, and instant messaging. Think of a VR world with its own Internet, with its own websites for services.
While the GFX is not on par with Unreal2004, it is the best looking VR world (besides sims online, which isnt a true VR world)
I guess people dont remember MOO's and all the building people did on those, with text only objects.
Maybe Visual IRC is a close description, where you can build scripts or theme the look of everything.
BTW, just like IRC, there are #hottub channels.
Unfortunately, no. Large swaths of the land ARE forests of idiotic billboards.
I've had a Second Life account for several months now, and had people call me nuts for paying for virtual land. Oddly enough, I got the same type of comments back in 1995, when I told people that I paid for space on a web server.
The analogy is a good one. Second Life is very much oriented towards scripters and modellers -- you can build anything you like and then write a script in C-like language that describes its behaviour. When you buy land, you're really paying for space on their servers where you can show off your latest creations.
Unlike Everquest, it's absolutely not a roleplaying game. It's a showcase, a meeting place, and a game-within-a-game. It's an online environment that comes remarkably close to Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash".
And if you're good at building or scripting, you can sell your stuff to other players for play money -- Linden dollars. You don't need to pay real money for anything except land -- space on their server. If you don't want space, don't buy it. Ten bucks will let you play and build whatever you like forever.
For those players who are too impatient to earn money in-world, like every other MMOG the Linden dollar can be bought and sold online at sites like www.gamingopenmarket.com. I personally have never needed to buy Linden dollars, and in fact, I've earned enough money from selling scripted objects in the game to cover the cost of land.
So... why pay money for something that isn't even real? Ask yourself why you have a website. The answer is probably the same.
Actually, the interesting thing is that Linden Labs doesn't directly profit from the real estate dealing going on with the game, other than in the offical new-simulator land auctions they run every once in a while as they add new machines to the cluster. They auction those off, and this is a very recent occurrence. Once they sell the land one time (for either L$ or real dollars) they only make money when it's rented out on a monthly basis. They'd make more money renting 512 square meter parcels to everyone, than they do renting the equivalent of a dedicated server for $195 a month. When someone in-world sells it, they don't take a percentage, cut, or anything similar. I could (and have) simply walk up to a plot of land offered for sale for L$5000, pay L$5000 and as long as I'm paying enough per-month for my land rights, it's mine. The fluctuation in pricing stops affecting LL directly after first sale.
There was pretty bad. Really bad. But once you see what people can do with SecondLife and the kind of creations it inspires - you'll see why people get into it for a lot less money than the MMORPG of the week. If I didn't want land, I'd never need to pay Linden Labs another dollar.
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