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Second Life Virtual Property Boom
The Guardian Gamesblog has an interview with Philip Rosedale, Second Life's CEO and Founder. In the wake of last week's virtual property slaying, they discuss the realities of owning something intangible. From the article: "We launched Second Life without out of world trade and after a few months we looked at it and thought, 'We're not doing this right, we're doing this wrong.' We started selling land free and clear, and we sold the title, and we made it extremely clear that we were not the owner of the virtual property. USD$.4m a month is traded directly to world markets in Linden Bucks on Gaming Open Market. That's USD$.4m redeemed, or Linden Bucks turned into US dollars. In May 2005, the total amount traded in-world was USD$1.47 million. There were 1.3 million transactions between 19,500 unique users."
In the case of dot.bomb we had a bunch of non-viable businesses and ideas with no effective business plan that could not stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately a lot of other viable ideas/businesses got burnt too.
The same goes for pyramid selling schemes. While there are new suckers/members to join up and fuel the system everything is great. Once the sucker/member fuel runs out they crash.
I recall a business selling Kruger Rands about 15 years ago. A Kruger Rand is just a minted ounce of gold, so has the tangible value of an ounce of gold. This crowd, however made a business of adding an enhanced value based on the condition and minting marks, coining phrases like bloom, sheen etc. Some coins sold for 5 to 10 times their tangible value. Eventually this bust and many people got burnt.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just wait until they try to wind it down and suddenly the lawsuits start flying for willful destruction of property.
Isn't that the whole point behind MMORPGs NOT allowing actual ownership in-game? Since if there's a server wipe or something they have no obligations to the players to return all their houses/loot?
This is my post. See sig above ^
This reminds me a lot of website property.
A company -- say, Amazon.com -- owns the title to a website. They have rights to the property at http://www.amazon.com/ . But the actual bits on the server don't have to reside on computers owned by Amazon; they could hire a hosting company to do that.
That's what's going on with Second Life. The video game is hosting the "site", and they're licensing rights to areas of the "site" to individual people.
Come to think of it, it also reminds me of an IPO. But instead of selling ownership, Second Life is selling rights to its product. I don't see anything wrong with this whatsoever.
Fax Baba!
This is no big deal. Are the people who buy paintings for way too much money losers too?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Everyone gets weirded out when you mention the idea of "intangible" property, yet few people have any qualms about paying bills online, using credit cards, or otherwise using money that they never see. Few get upset when they buy/download software that is just as intangible as the goods in an online game.
So is it really the intangible property that weirds people out? Or the fact that the general media has no damn clue how online games work?
With so many ppl on
So this is like RL all over again? I play games to escape from reality, if rich kids can have all the cool eq/chars/whatever in the game as well, what does that leave me with? I might as well be a poor loser somewhere where I don't have to pay money.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Selling intangible property is more similar to offering to shovel somebody's driveway for cash, than to selling your old stereo. That the item is neither tangible nor permanent makes it no less legitimate. (However, I would never pay real money for RTS property.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I have not played this MMORPG but have played many others. Paying for things in these games may seem insane to you. But once you get addicted and start putting in a few hours a day, $5 for the uber sword of death or some land seems very reasonable.
On the other hand it can turn the game into a "only those with more money have fun" type of thing... Well I guess they are trying to make it more like real life.
Well, how can you virtualize something that's already virtual?
The monetary system in the country (and all others, as far as I know) is based upon a shared (and mutually agreed-upon) illusion of value.
This is what Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (and Cryptonomicon, for that matter) was talking about. This isn't a virtualization of money, this IS money. These people are creating money, printing their own currency in the most elemental way possible, they're thinking it up.
It's interesting for that reason alone, aside from what people are actually doing with the service.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
It does seem a bit odd after all with processing power/storage growing the way it is, the same computer that can generate say 800sq miles of linden land today will be able to generate a much larger sized plot tomorrow, how does that factor into the equation ?
Also it would be more altruistic if they allowed you to host your own server with your own land that you can control who can visit. That way people who provide their own server get the benefit of not having to pay maintenance fees (they would still pay for the software, developers have to eat I agree, being one myself).
Think of it this way many games i.e. Quake, Counterstrike have worked for years by providing networking functionality and people create their own servers etc.
Granted MMO networks need to be much larger and persistent, though why can't they take the BitTorrent approach. Rather than have one central bank of many powerful servers, all computers running the game could connect together to form an adhoc grid with just as much computing power if not more. This would negate the huge maintenance costs required and hence the need for monthly fees. Which is where I see the sinister part, it's like saying rather than lets look for a better solution, lets look for the most expensive solution.
People are forgetting one thing: in this game, the game creators are basically gods. Even if they promise to not change anything on the perfectly located beachfront property with gold mines and AI bikini girls, there's nothing that can stop them from making a hundred more islands with identical property when they feel the need to squeeze a bit more cash out of the game. Or what if they release an expansion with new content that makes assets in the old game worth almost nothing in comparison? People who have played Everquest for a moderate amount of time will know what I'm talking about. When the game was first released, a rare sword from the bottom of a high level dungeon was something everyone wanted to get. A few expansions later, it became completely worthless, not because anything about that item or the difficultly in getting it changed, but because equivalent and better weapons were easily gotten in the new areas from the expansions. Having not played Second Life, I can't say that example directly applies to the game, but it does illustrate the omnipotent amount of power that the game designers have over your property and its worth.
Not that I anticipate this brave new world with without hesitations. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, the day an unemployed ironworker can go home, sit in his easy chair, open a beer, put on a headset, and fuck Claudia Schiffer (this was in the early '90s), it's going to make crack look like Sanka. Which leads to another interesting question: when people start investing large proportions of their net worth in virtual real estate, and start to work primarily in the massive multiplayer, are 80 hour weeks spent online going to start to become conventional?
Sorry, I got to go buy some shares in companies that manufacture adult diapers.
--Moiche