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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.
Are we all really this stupid?
:)
Only our customers? Just kidding...
Seriously, I play Second Life also, and when I found out you have to trade real money for in-game items, and you have to do this frequently, and sometimes on a recurring basis, I kindof lost interest... I'm all for trading real money for in-game money, at least that's clear-cut. Just don't let me trade real money for in-game money, and then require me to use both in-game money AND real money in game.
Reminds me of Itchy and Scratchy Land...
If this thing really takes off (reading up on it now), and if it's not been done yet, the Black Sun (as in the coolest online hangout in 'Snow Crash') might be a cool idea...
Are there any 'safeguards' against company insiders giving themselves land? What if a game change 'devalues' certain land (by blocking the view, for instance). I can see lots of potential for RL legal proceedings based on this.
Why waste your money on a web server?
Oh you want to present content to the rest of the people who browse the web? Sounds like you might need to pay for hosting.
If you join SL on the basic plan, you don't have to pay anything other than the $10 to activate the account. It's free after that; but then you own no land.
SL real estate is divided into a grid of servers. The land is sold so that the monthly subscriptions pays to keep the hardware going. The more land you own, the more server resources you're using, so the more you pay. You can even get your own dedicated servers, as islands off the mainland.
It's more or less like buying web hosting.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I "played" Second life for awhile. Began looking at the code for the bumper cars, wanted to make a virtual Nurburgring for cars to drive. I was simply fascinated by the fact the game loaded nothing on your drive beyond primitives. Everything was sent to you over the wire.
The graphics are obviously not on par with even EQ1, much less EQ2 - and the entire model doesn't lend itself to that.
When I went looking sometimes for where everyone was at, I found kind of an unseemly side of SL. Everyone had bondage outfits on and was hanging out at the virtual techno club, trying to pick each other up. There was some weird stuff going on the in "back rooms". Use your imagination. I ignored that side of the world, was more interested in things that were a little more accessible to kids.
Ultimately I found the tools were not as interesting as doing what I am doing now, working with web technologies to do my own game, and working on virtual tracks with tools designed for that purpose. (Google for Project Wildfire for N2003 if interested).
Anyhow, one of the immediate obstacles in doing a huge track like the Ring, is there was no way i was going to get the land I needed to do it. I asked a few people, sent a few emails. After all, they could just make the landmass bigger, right? It was all surrounded by one endless ocean. Well, I got some emails from other people saying essentially, no they couldn't do that. I guess there is some limit to the engine and how much land there is. I don't really know, I never got a response from anyone from Linden Lab.
Anyhow, when people ask me what could be done with fiber into everyone's homes anyhow, why do people need more bandwidth than they have - I show them second life. To have a fully Gibson like cyberspace means going down the development road of SL, where no "maps" exist on your hard drive.
I think it's flat out ridiculous that SL has a makeshift real estate market. Everyone was hogging the "coasts" to build gaudy beach homes - kind of like real life. And like real life, very few people had any taste - lots of cheap spiral staircases and stupid fountains on the "lawn" with tigerstripe bedspreads. Bunch of Hugh Hefners.
Oh, and one of the most popular clans were a bunch of bikers, guys with huge arms and denim vests with biker bitches on virtual hogs they rode around. Classy. Strange how the first things that popped up were sex clubs and biker gangs.
I've been playing Second Life since shortly before the 1.2 release shipped, (last December), so I've been there for the whole land crunch/boom process. This newspaper article, like most, only scratches the surface... it vaguely describes the scenario, but gives no history and no clear understanding.
Second Life completely changed its economic system in 1.2. In the 1.1 and prior days, object creation and maintenance cost in-game money. Objects are made of 'primitives' or 'prims': spheres, rectangles, cones, toruses (torii??) and probably 1 or two more. For a long time, every object you created cost you 10 Linden Dollars to 'rez', or create. When you destroyed the object, you were refunded your money. Further, if you wanted to create permanent objects, you were taxed a maintenance fee on a daily basis, which you did not get back. Your weekly stipend was roughly $500, so it was critical to come up with goods and services to sell if you wanted to maintain any kind of large permanent structure in SL. This meant that everything was very secretive and hardly ANYTHING was for free, because giving away anything damaged your own ability to build things. Land was very cheap, often the minimum price of $1/square meter, simply because few people could afford to fill much space... only a few very successful people and groups could build really large structures. There was also a 'height tax'... an object high above the ground cost more than an object near the ground. This also discouraged large structures and tended to keep everyone low and small. (heck, at one time there was even a 'teleport tax'.... you had to pay to be teleported somewhere instead of flying. Abolished long before I got there.)
The entire economic model shifted when 1.2 came out. Suddenly, object creation was free. There was no maintenance on anything you built. Instead, you were allocated a certain number of prims to put on land...each land parcel is able to support a certain number of prims. (A starting player is allowed to buy 512m2, which will support about 115 prims: they can buy more land if they want to pay more each month.) The second really large change was that you could own as much land as you wanted, as long as you were willing to pay for it in RL $. You mostly still had to buy it with in-game currency, but you paid for the right to own extra land in real dollars. As an example, someone who wants to own 4,096m2, which is a pretty comfortable size, will have to pay around $25/mo to support it.
So, suddenly, land was very desirable, and almost instantly scarce. Apparently, Linden Labs also went back through their records, figured out every dollar of object tax that had ever been paid by residents, and refunded it. So a whole lot of Linden Dollars were injected into the system all at once. To make things worse, a whole new class of parasite arose, whose sole purpose was land speculation. They drove land prices into the stratosphere. At the same time, a new service, Gaming Open Market, was launched, which allows trading RL $ for L$. This meant that people who really wanted to own property or otherwise do something could throw a lot of real-life money at it. At about this same time, word seemed to get into the mass market about Second Life, and with the population explosion, speculation, and Gaming Open Market, prices went to really crazy levels. I believe some of the speculators, as well as a number of the early players who suddenly had large wads of virtual cash, made thousands of real dollars. In the case of the speculators, I despise them for doing this, because they provided nothing of benefit in exchange. They DETRACTED from the Second Life world, made it much harder for new people to get started, simply to line their own pockets. I think it's great when people get rich foom MAKING things, and am perfectly content with the tax refund, but I consider the speculators to be nothing more than by-the-rules thieves.
SL has grown WILDLY over the last four or five months. There continues to b
The article linked to has a few flaws in it, unfortunately. One of which is the claim that there's a $9.95 a month fee to join SecondLife. I'm sure others will have pointed this out long before I did. There are two "tiers" of membership, the one-time lifetime registration fee of $9.95 or a monthly $9.95 price to become a premium member with a few extra services, primary of which is the ability to own up to 512 square meters of land parcel as long as you're a premium member.
There, the recently-abandoned social VR site that I found out about before SecondLife, tended to have a real problem with RL$ and VR$ exchanges. You really did have to shell out RL cash for VR buckage, and on a pretty significant range of expenses. Articles of clothing are insanely pricy "There". In contrast with There, the management at Linden Labs (SecondLife's developers) has provided a great deal of control over the economy. They permit - but don't promote - sites such as the gaming open market, and have very few different reasons to try and get real money from you. Primarily, the income for Linden Labs is created by monthly fees to own land. This makes sense, as each chunk of land is essentially a pretty significant chunk of server load. I own roughly 1/16th of the resources of an entire 2.8Ghz server machine, and pay $25 a month for the priviledge. This allows me over a thousand objects with which I can create my own buildings, art objects, whatever. That's the only money Linden Labs gets from me on an ongoing basis.
For in-world money, Linden Dollars (L$) the exchange rate in real money is completely dwarfed by what you can actually make in world by simply being an amiable individual and putting together a few fun events. I've got around L$7000 in world right now, thanks in part to my managing an in-world streaming radio station called Radio SLive which broadcasts an average of 4-5 nights per week of personalized music and banter using Live365's crummy (but legal) alternatives. Offhand, anyone knowing an alternative to L365 that allows for no-login, no-required-webpage referral licensed music streaming - sorry, no independent-only options, we need the RIAA stuff. It's what people want.) please let me know.
If I were to convert the money I've made into real dollars, I'd probably be able to pull around $30 out of SecondLife. Do I really intend to do that? Not a chance. In-world, that money really has a great amount of value. Simply by earning bonuses based on my social interaction with people (you earn positive and negative ratings based on actions, appearance, and build quality) you I made upwards of L$500 a week - enough to buy some cars with, and half-price for many aircraft, some of the most expensive non-land related expenses in the world. I wheeled, dealed, and pleaded to pay the in-world expense to buy my land from other players, and now only need to spend $25 a month to maintan the server space to hold it. It really isn't so bad - I could have almost as much fun with 512 square meters of land, if I weren't hosting occasional events and presenting an in-world frontage for the radio station. Clothing can be made for free - no fees beyond a L$10 upload fee for graphics and 9 second sound clips - and objects (primitives - prims) can be made in-world for attachment to a person's avatar at no costs. The only cost to create items in world is to do so on private land - there are a number of sandbox regions where people can create larger objects without much restriction. A great place to play with building a home before you get land to put it on. Coding in-world is free, and there are even many scripts written and released with a GPL-style license. Some even with the GPL itself.
The real-world to L$ economy is not nearly as bad as it is in other places, simply due to the fact that a great time can be had for literally peanuts. You don't need to own land to have a good time, though it can help. Land is continually being offered at low, low prices to landless peopl
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