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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
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
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 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.
Society has finally reached so low that it has forced us to created an alternative virtual world to live in.
Actually, its nice people can have an outlet to do things that they cant do in real life. This is why you see so many Marijuana art in the game, Goth looking people. Our society won't permit or allow people to be totaly free, sometimes you have to go online to make a little digital freedom.
Some peoples just cant show up as the bank teller dressed on Goth in RL, so SL has to do. The USA wont allow gay's to marry, or legalize drugs, online you can be and do what you want. (Well, mostly, but thats another topic...)
I would imagine that people with these second lives could better spend the time improving their first ones.
If they live a full healthy productive lifes, whats a few hours a night online with friends having fun? Really annoying people think they know whats best for you. Its the same as going to the bar after work, or going on nature walks, or sitting and playing a guitar...
Amazing how many Slashdot readers are Conservatives. People should be free from moral censorship, as in (They should... comments) just shows how far from a open democracy we really are.
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.