An individual at a fan-based MUD for the game Entropia has sold a number of properties to another player for $335,000 US. Since Entropia’s in-world currency can be converted to US currency, the money is real: $335,000 in real US dollars changed hands. This is the most expensive virtual property transaction known to date.
I play in Second Life, people there can and do rent virtual space from Second Lifes’ owners, Linden Labs, for about $75US a week. I have always considered this to be insanely high money to spend, but looking at the Entropia deal, I’m gonna have to recalibrate my definition of “insane.”
For the record, it costs nothing to play Second Life although there are all sorts of gadgets and geegaws you can pick up like clothes and hair and weapons and homes and such for very little money. (Linden bucks are convertable to US bucks at a rate of 1000 Lindens for four US dollars, roughly … which a few months ago made Linden bucks more valuable than Columbian pesos.) I spend roughly 2 bucks a week on such stuff, on and off. Some people, particularly those who play female avatars, spend a lot more than that on clothes.
Do you play games with in-world currencies that are convertable to real world cash? What are the rates like? What’s going on out there in the cyberverse in terms of alternate currencies.
Gold-sellers are the bane of MMORPG’s existence. These are primarily Chinese companies that hire people to play the games and “farm”–ie, repetitively complete certain tasks to earn in-game currency and items. They then sell the in-game stuff to other players for real money. It’s generally considered a violation of the EULA, and grounds for banning the accounts involved on either side of the transaction if caught.
Similar are “power leveling” services, where a player can pay a third party to level their characters for them.
All this is bad enough, but there are some entities that will advertise services similar to the above in an attempt to get the player to divulge sign-in information. Doing so often results in the account being “hacked”, all items sold/disenchanted, guild bank being raided, etc.
In Everquest 2, Sony had certain servers that were sorta similar to what the OP describes…where players could buy in game stuff for real money, but at least arguably legitimately, since Sony was running the show, and those characters were allegedly restricted to those special servers. When that happened, a lot of people, including myself, left that game forever, and have refused to patronize any Sony game since. Don’t know if that is still happening or not.
WoW allows players to buy certain in-game things for real money, but the stuff available that way is largely cosmetic…pets or mounts that do not affect game play or give a competitive advantage.
Entropia seems to pop up every so often with one of these transactions; it’s the only time I ever hear anything about it, ever. I will remain skeptical until someone takes their $300,000 OUT of the game economy.
EVE Online allows you to inject real money into the game in the form of 30-day game time cards, which can then be sold or bought on the game market. This allows an accurate currency conversion to be made, but the trick is that the money cannot be taken OUT of the game. Stories pop up about money being stolen from other players from time to time, and a recent theft was estimated to be worth about $45,000. Since you can’t take money out of the game world, except insofar as you can buy time in-game, this is kind of meaningless.
The economics of Second Life were in place before combat came along, the problem is addressed in SL with what is called “metered combat” in which sims have combat meters installed that govern weapons use. Weapons are made by and are purchased from third parties whose weapons must meet the specs (speed, range, rate of fire, etc.) set by the combat meter. Most sims have approved weapons lists, if your weapon is not on the approved list you are not allowed to participate in combat on that sim. Freebie weapons are generally available … I got my start by using freebie weapons until I got good enough with them that the little extras you get by purchasing weapons mattered.
There are of course some players who MUST win so there are cheat scripts that enhance speed, auto return fire, etc., and there are tools that detect them. Players who use such scripts tend to get banned, but since you can have as many as eight free accounts on SL, cheaters who get banned a lot tend to just shift to a new alt. Such folks are generally despised by the bulk of SL players.
There are no “levels” in the SL combat I participate in, so there is no problem with “leveling up.” Some people are a lot better than others, it is because they have more practice, experience and skill, for the most part.
Since there is real currency backing Linden bucks, which is easily convertable, there are people who try to hack other’s accounts, most often by giving them a “free gift” that contains a script which hacks their account. For that reason, most SL users do not accept stuff from those they do not know.
I can see how it would be maddening to people who play the game to develop skills to know that there are others who can attain the same skill levels just by spending money.
A good point … in SL you buy Lindens, I guess in Entropia you can earn Entropia bucks within the game without injecting cash into the game, so that these people can have hundreds of thousands of Entropia bucks to throw around? If so, what keeps people from mining the Entropia economy for real cash, earning Entropia bucks and then cashing out? (SL has opportunities to earn Lindens in-game but the wages are really, really low.)
How would one “cash out” in this scenario? It’s not like the game company is going to cut you a check for the real world value of your money, right? Money goes in, it doesn’t come out. I guess you could sell the in-game assets to other people in violation of the EULA on ebay or whatever, but that’s pretty much the exact thing as gold farming. And more importantly, it’s not as if the game company isn’t monitoring the guy who has 8 gazillion in game money units - if they don’t allow external selling, the guy will get banned pretty quickly.
I mean… I don’t get the point of these stories. There’s no way to “cash out”, right? So converting in-game currency to cash value is pretty silly. Yes, you can figure out how much cash you’d have to spend to get so much in-game currency, but there’s no ratio of in-game currency converted to cash because you can’t.
Edit: The OP says “Since Entropia’s in-world currency can be converted to US currency” - that means you can say it’d cost $10 to buy 100 entropia bucks in game, therefore 1000 entropia bucks = $100 real US dollars, right? In other words, stating the real world dollar->entropia buck conversion rate. It doesn’t mean it can be converted in the sense of turning the entropia bucks into real dollars, right?
I think it’s an EFT instead of a cheque. They do it so people will play their crappy game trying to get rich like the people they read about in these articles.
Hmm, do the conversion rates land them a net gain? ie $10 US dollars for 100 game bucks, but it costs 200 gamebucks to cash out $10 US dollars, or else how do they make a profit?
In the case of Second Life, yes. There are several approved Linden - Dollar exchanges, and you can even see the market data here. Most exchanges make their money off the spread.
I recall this coming up in a discussion on Terra Nova (I think); someone posted saying that, yes, he had made money in Entropia, but basically to do so you have to spend your whole time doing really boring grinding and it amounts to a less-than-minimum-wage job.
Well you have to be able to cash out or it’s not real money and presumably would have made no splash in the media. It’s all Monopoly money if it’s not a real-world currency. In the case of Second Life, you put four USD in via your credit card or paypal, you get 1000 Linden bucks to play with. And if you take 1000 Linden bucks out, you can convert them to four USD on your credit card or Paypal account,with the Linden currency exchange making a few pennies in each transaction.
Which is why you can play Second Life for free.
Now I checked around the biggest Second Life forum and found out some interesting info. The largest single transaction known in Second Life was the sale of an adult sim called “Amsterdam” for $50,000 US. There is a Second Life merchant who is reputed to be worth over a million in US dollars if she were to cash out – the person who cited that rumor said they take it with a grain of salt, and I think that is a wise idea. There are millions of Second Life players worldwide and most I am sure are cheapos like me, but like I said, a lot of players spend a lot of Linden bucks on clothes and hair for their avvies … it’s a chance to be an “in-game” wealthy person.
I guess that was what interested me about the Entropia story, I was wondering whether other games were developing vigorous in-world economies like Second Life, all unknown to the general public. Based on the response here, I am guessing not.
On edit, the link to the SL dollar exchange should give you a pretty good idea of the size of the Second Life game economy.