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Virtual Real Estate Purchased For $100,000
mike1086 wrote to mention a BBC article discussing a $100,000 virtual land purchase in the Project Entropia world. From the article: "The space station is described as a 'monumental project' in the 'treacherous, but mineral rich' Paradise V Asteroid Belt and comes with mining and hunting taxation rights. With the price tag also comes mall shopping booth and market stall owner deeds, a land management system, a billboard marketing system, and space station naming rights. " The official release has further details. You may recall these folks from the expensive island purchase a while back.
Because Mac and Linux users already live in a fantasy world.
Unless this guy doesn't know what to do with his money, this is probably a well-calculated business move. It's just like buying a building and renting the units to tenants, except he does it on a virtual property.
Business must be good, since the game won't go on for ever. He probably expects to get his money back within a year or two, if not sooner - that's a 50% return after 3 years (assuming he's bringing in fifty thousand each year). The only thing that can stop him is if the game experiences a sudden drop in population or if the company that runs it goes under and the server(s) shut down.
How does this Project Entropia thing work? From the web site:
... A unique aspect of Project Entropia is that a player may elect to transfer PED back into real life currency, thereby enabling them to earn real money while playing an online computer game.
The real cash economy means that the internal Project Entropia economy is linked to the real world economy, by using a currency called the Project Entropia Dollar (PED), which have a fixed exchange rate to the US Dollar (10 PED equals 1 USD).
As I understand it, every game economy needs sources and sinks for the currency. I suppose players withdrawing this ped currency out into real usd would work as a sink, but what are the sources? In a completely virutal economy the game can just create money out of thin air, but in this system they can't do that. Are there some players that just constantly pay to play, and other that collect profits and earn thier money?
Aw crap, ninjas!
There are 3 sources of income:
Hunting
Mining
Crafting
Hunting, you need a weapon, and when you kill a monster you may (but probably won't...) loot some money, and possibly an item.
In mining, you use bombs to locate resources in the ground, and then a tool to extract them.
In crafting, you need a blueprint, and the resources called for to make the particular item, these having been obtained by someone mining.
Hunting and mining require weapons or tools, which decay with use. This decay is not permanent. Items can be repaired back to their maximum trade terminal value at cost. The decay per use varies form item to item, anywhere between $0.001 to (the highest I know of...) $0.10. I addition to item decay, hunting requires ammo. One unit of ammo costs 1 pec (1 pec = $0.001). Mining requires bombs, which cost 1 ped each (1 ped = $0.10).
Crafting just requires the raw materials. On each attempt, you may fail completely and loose the amount required for one try; you may succeed, and create the item; or you may partially succeed, and get back some or all of the following: some or all of the raw materials; some residue which can be sold of an amount that will be about as much as the attempt cost. As with all items, the crafted ones have a maximum value and on success its value will be a random amount between 2 or 3 times the cost to make and its fully repaired value, which in some cases can be several hundred ped. Expensive items can take 10's of ped to make in terms of TT (trade terminal) value. However, unless you mine the minerals yourself, you must buy them at some mark up that will range between 105% of tt for common minerals and 150-200% for rarer ones. The rarest mineral, which is not found often, goes for as much as 1500%.
When hunting or mining, you may find an exceptionally large loot, or mineral resource. If the value is over 50 ped, a global message is sent saying "NAME has (killed a created/found a deposit) (creature name/mineral type) worth XXX ped!" There is a "Hall Of Fame" board which records the type 25 loots/mineral deposits/crafting successes for the last 24 hours. It alls shows the top 25 all time highs. When crafting, the message will come up if the item or value of the resulting residue is worth 50ped +. Rarely, you will also manufacture one or more gems of various type worth between 150 and 500 ped.
Currently, the largest loot ever was a mineral resource worth 42,600 ped, or $4,260US. Incidentally, this was found last week. The highest crafting is 32k ped, and the highest hunting is 29k ped. These were also found in the last two weeks.
The game is essentially a zero sum game. When you begin you get NOTHING but an orange jumpsuit worth 0 ped. There is no way in the game to acquire items worth more than 0 ped without depositing money, or being given it by another avatar. There are trade terminals which sell basic junk that no one uses. All other items are either crafted, or looted. The blueprints to craft items cost 0.01 ped each, and minerals must be found by mining (which requires money for tools and bombs).
Essential, when the game began, there was no way for the first play to get money from the game before he put money into the game. Mindark (the company that makes/runs the game) is very secretive about how the loot system works, but I would suspect that there is never more loot to be had then has been lost by players through item decay, ammo burn, supply burn, or crafting failures. Otherwise, MindArk would go broke.
The best equipment is extremely rare, and expensive to buy. The most expensive item market wise is a medical kit that commonalty sells for 50kUS. In the time that I have been playing (1.4 years give or take), no more then 3 of these have been looted. The best weapons and armor sell for 2-10kUS.
The loot system is VERY stingy. It is not uncommon to spend 2 or 3 hundred ped in ammo burn/item decay, before (maybe...) getting a large loot to break even. There are 60 or 70 different skills that determine
________
Magnus frater spectat te
Virtual real estate?
How about just fake estate?
-Dave
This has puzzled me as well. My roomate got into the early alpha, 3 or 4 years ago, but there was NOTHING in the game and we forgot about it untill a year ago.
THe game seems to have a large undergound following, mostly in Euroupe.
One thing it has going for it: You can download the game, set up an account, and "play" without the use of a credit card for anything at all. Granted you will have no money to playwith, but a kind player may give you some noob equipment so you can hunt. Compare this to say WOW, which requiers a trip to a store, 50 bucks up front, and then credit card info to get your "free" month of play.
When the 26k island sold last year, there was a HUGE influx of new players, far more then a similar event in WOW would probably bring.
On the other hand, the figure of 260k accounts is misleading. SInce there is no money fee, accounts are never deactivated or locked. If you make a noob and play for an hour, you can come back a year later as if you never left.
________
Magnus frater spectat te
I could understand someone purchasing a large amount of land in an incredibly popular game like World of Warcraft for that price, but not in Project Entropia.
Two words: Viral Marketing.
Until somebody interviews the player behind "Neverdie", you don't know that this guy isn't an employee of the company. He buys a piece of virtual for and eye-popping and publicity generating $100,000, and gets a company bonus for oh, say, $100,000 plus enough to cover income taxes for generating publicity.
The value of a property is based on the net present value of its future income stream, discounted by the risk. It'd be a nearly inconceivable vote of confidence in the company hosting this games future stability and ability to create business on a pretty impressive scale -- if it's for real.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was just wondering how much people would pay for a /. account with excellent karma.
-- Cheers!