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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.
They might as well post to Slashdot.
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
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...
According to this article $100US=$10Linden which appears to indicate that its really hard to make money in this game. KInda scary really when the fake money is worth more than the real thing.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
I'd be all over some main street real estate, but those giant walking, talking penises are gonna make prices dip.
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A testimony from Ralph:
My first deal, a nice lake front property on Dagobah in Star Wars: Galaxies, netted me five hundred million dollars!
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I also reply below your current threshold.
You are quite right. Second Life is expanding 20% each week! New land masses are added all the time. 11 New Sims (Servers) were added just a day or so ago.
If you want to try out Second Life on a trial basis, click here
"Ocean Front Property in a server farm running in a datacenter in Arizona"
At some point this week I'll sleep and these thoughts will quit plaguing me.
matt.
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
buy low, sell high, get out before the crash.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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 don't spend much time in SecondLife any more as my real life keeps getting in the way but anyone that hasn't should really give it a try. Keep in mind it's not necessarily a game but more a really advanced social tool. You get a free trial and if the whole land-owning idea doesn't appeal to you, you can pay a one time $10 fee and hang out all you want. The in-game tools are very capable and getting more advanced all of the time. Some of the things people have come up with in SecondLife are extremely creative and your time would not be wasted there if you were just to spend it wandering around seeing what others have done.
For the Linuxites, it runs under winex as indicated *shameless plug*here*/shameless plug*.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
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.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
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
My first life is already too expensive to afford a second life, you insensitive clod!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If you buy a web domain and put stuff on a web server attached to it, anyone with an Internet connection can see that stuff. Not so with Second Life "real estate." I also imagine that Second Life isn't as flexible as the Web is, either. Not to mention the fact that the "real estate's" value is dependent on the mostly artificial rarity of it, while with web domains, there's hardly such a thing as rarity.
Rob
a) use land fill to create new waterfront properties (e.g. Hong Kong)
b) drain swamp land (e.g. Florida)
c) level mountains to make an area buildable (various areas)
d) build in theoretically undesirable areas and make them desirable (e.g. Las Vegas)
It just requires less effort in the virtual world. And less environmental review processes.
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.
Maybe if people spent this kind of energy/money on their first lives they'd be a lot happier. You'd be smarter to just give me your money. In fact...
in bed.
BondageQueen: Nice place you've got here.
OutlawBiker: Thanks. All the chairs talk dirty when you sit on them, too.
BondageQueen: So clever of you. So, can I get the tour?
OutlawBiker: Not right now; most of the house is on another server that's overloaded.
BondageQueen: I'm outta here.
OutlawBiker: Wait! The laundry room still works! Honest!
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
I can see this becoming even more of a draw to people for whom Everquest and the likes just don't hold any appeal. The addiction will remain the same, but the lure of a virtual world where chatting to individuals rather than fighting is the focus brings in a completely new crowd, females, younger kids and older adults. These people could care less about RPG's but there is a lot of potential for spending too much time here, especially if things like voice chat start being introduced, replacing "normal" RL interactions.
Incredible Adventures has the fix you need. Not an A-10, but way, way faster. Will a MiG-29 do?
Unfortunately, no. Large swaths of the land ARE forests of idiotic billboards.
What I'm thinking would be to make it a lot like the internet.. That is, a network for networks.
;-) ).
Do it in stages. First off, we define our game. Assume it's simple for now, something similar to Second Life but smaller. A group of people running clients define their local world. You can take it down a notch and let every computer define it's own local building if you like. This would make the most sense.. if you're not connected, your building isn't there. It's just a blank spot of land. If you want to support more users or more complex buildings, update your hardware to be faster or throw more PC's at the problem. We can use a public key authentication mechanism of some type to verify who owns what land. This key mechanism will come in handy for the next bit.
Next, we step it up and make communities possible. Areas owned by a group of people, probably in the same geographic real-life area. They can all collaborate to build this space, and all their machines are in a P2P network to handle its existance. If somebody in the network starts cheating, its up to the community to throw the guy off their communal space. This could be done by several methods, but the most obvious of which would be to revoke his key to the space. See, in order to go in and change the community space, you have to have your key signed by others in that community. If we have a revocation mechanism, they can revoke that signature and suddenly he can't access that space anymore. We can go a step further and ban him from that space if we choose. For bigger spaces or something, we simply throw more computing power at the problem. Each community is sharing the load already, so more power in the community makes for more power to throw at the group spaces. Somebody will have to have power in this community to control access, but it'll likely be a small group of like minded individuals anyway, so they can work out their own leadership issues.
Next, we link these all together into a city or even into a world. Two ways to do this...
The P2P way is to let communities form larger communities, providing links between them. Essentially, two communities agree to link to each other in some way, and then users can wander from one community to another via some shared community space. Think of it like a road that both communities agree to build between themselves. No need to limit it to two per road though, the road can go anywhere you like, it can branch three ways if three communities want to deal with it. That sort of thing. The more computing power the community has, the more shared community spaces they can support, obviously. It scales up from there.. Anywhere in the world that isn't connected is an island. Anywhere that is connected is on the same continent (or if you prefer, has a road between their islands.. same thing, really.. depends on if they want to make land between them or a bridge
The other way to do it requires a central server system. Somebody hosting the world and controlling who owns what. Much like the Metaverse in Snow Crash, you have the main people who created the world and host the road around it. Those who want space on the world have to buy or otherwise obtain it, but at that point what's actually on that space is entirely controlled by the processor power you throw at that space. Each person carries their own load.
Cheating in this sort of thing is really a non-issue. Each person is hosting their own mess. If you want to screw up your mess, feel free to do so, but nobody will link to your space and you'll just be an island. Let small groups band together on their own to form community spaces and enforce whatever rules they see fit. Let communities connect to each other if they want to do so. It's all up to them at that point.
Practical matters: For a user wandering this space, he has to drop into the world somewhere by connecting to some community. This is all a matter of the protocol, really. Just standardize the protocol and let the guy hop from system to system a
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
To all those who reply in Latin, I say, "non gratis anus rodentium"
Are any sociologists and economists studying this phenomenon? I mean, here we are, applying *real* human resources, feelings, thoughts, time, and money to an A-Life. Instead of building "ants" and "bots" for a simulation, we *are* the ants and bots in this one. IMHO, this could get interesting real quick.
C|N>K
Well, I agree with you here. This whole deal with online properties being traded for real money and all is confusing and very hard to understand for me. However, I have a 12 year old cousin who plays one of these kind of games. Free subscription, but to decorate her online "rooms" she needs to send text messages to the company, which in return gives her credits with which she can "buy" crap in game. I asked her why she'd pay good money for something immaterial which isn't really hers, even after she paid for it. The answer was quite simple; "Because it's fun to play this game!"
That's how allot of people feel about this, I suppose. They don't spend money on owning something, they spend money on something fun and interesting. If you think of it this way, it's quite comparable to buying a computer/console game, a book or a DVD. Just something we do because we can be entertained with it. Of course, there are extremes and exceptions, with people spending hundreds of dollars on game items, but those people are a minority.
However, that doesn't change the fact that whenever you buy SOMETHING, it's not yours anyways. You're almost always dealing with companies whose main purpose is to make a profit, not to entertain you. The cousin I referred to before, for example, used a very weak password and someone hijacked her account and stole all her ingame stuff. I'll never say this in her face, but that's pretty much her own fault. Still, she contacted the company running that game and after a while, it got settled by the company. The person who stole all her items had all the items deleted, but they couldn't give my cousin "her" items back. So much for actually owning something online. Ah well, I try to keep an open mind about these kind of things...
Hate me!
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
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
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.
Heh, if I had a L$1 for every floating glowing spinning mall and casino sign I had to fly past or live next to, I could be the next big SL Land Baron.
--Chromal Brodsky
Is it legal to pk in this game?
If so, then I'd be more inclined to move onto some property that I didn't own, and "buy" it by killing everyone that came upon it. I mean, are they going to throw me in virtual jail or something? Would I have to pay a $$ fine to get out?
If there is no pk'ing, I still don't see why you can't just stand there and pretend it's yours. People would have to figure out how to move you... which might not be possible.
Virtual property is lame. You'd have to be a real dope to pay real money for it. Of course, I'd have a ton of fun making life difficult for the dopes that "own" the bits that are streaming into my computer.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I've been checking out SecondLife for awhile, and it seems to be a lot more about toys and things then it does about social interaction.
You own land, you buy toys and houses for it for other people to look at..
SecondLife is glitchy, the controls are awkward, and the graphics are buggy. There is a noticable lag between when you move and when you actually move on the screen.
The scripting functionality is neat, but your average player doesn't want to write them or even bother with ones other people have written.
In There, it's all about social interaction. There is actually fun to play and it's fun to interact with other people. The graphics are not world class, but the character animation is superb and the items in the world are actually fun to use. The buggies drive easy, movement is easier, exploration is more fun.
The chat system in There is interesting as well. When you join a conversation (conversations are automatically created when two people talk a few lines to each other) you are automatically positioned around the group like you were really standing in a group talking.
In There, anyone can use anyone's vehicles and other items. I can find a buggy and jump in and drive. I can even hold it in my own inventory. When the owner logs in and wants it back, all he has to do is recall it. I've been loaned all sorts of cool stuff for weeks at a time.
I'm not even someone who likes to try and make friends in virtual spaces, such as MMORPGs. But in There, it's pleasantly unavoidable. Most people are really friendly and it's quite easy to hang out with people for hours and not even notice the clock ticking away.
There's game show events where you can win virtual cash, there's clubs, there's paintball wars, and buggy races. Tons of stuff to do, and it's fun to do with other people.
I'm not saying that SecondLife is terrible, but if you're into just relaxing, chatting a little, and playing a laid back game, SecondLife can't even be compared to There.
There isn't as cheap as SecondLife for a basic membership but There isn't any more expensive then your average MMORPG if you want to buy all the fun items. And like SecondLife, you don't have to buy everything, there's plenty you can do to make money in the game.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -