Real investments in virtual worlds continue

January 3, 2010 By 6 Comments

I was pretty surprised to see social media blog Mashable is ‘utterly baffled‘ by someone investing a record $330,000 in a virtual space station in the online MMORPG Entropia Universe, despite the fact they themselves quote figures of $600 million invested in virtual worlds in January 2009 alone, and the $2 billion virtual economy in China.

Don’t forget back in 2004, David Storey paid $26,500 in Entropia, then Jon Jacobs invested $100,000 in a virtual space station in Entropia in November 2005, and of course Anshe Chung became a millionaire via Second Life in 2006.

Apparently both David and Jon have made their money back and more. Meanwhile back in 2004, Julian Dibbell wrote Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot about his attempt to match or increase his income by trading in Ultima Online – he also wrote a great blog about the experience.

What’s surprising is that the Mashable author, and probably 50% of those commenting, still express disbelief that investing in a virtual good can be worthwhile, despite the fact that we’re all happy to discuss investments in websites, or even in media companies. If your media company goes bust, you might get a share in a building and some outdated PCs locked on a defunct corporate network, but the real value is in the minds of the employees – another virtual asset!

And given the economic climate, I’m not sure I’d count any investment as being comparitively reliable – but the move is certainly towards investing in ‘idea’ companies. And of course, the rapidly expanding, already massive, social gaming companies such as Zynga.  Pervasive gaming as entertainment is here, but pervasive gaming as a legitimate, recognized career follows whenever a game is designed to allow the exchange of goods by players (or the players themselves find ways to exchange – e.g. Ebay).

It’s another hugely interesting impact of gaming as the interactive entertainment medium which has risen up to compete with traditional entertainment forms (TV, radio, print), and at the same time powers so many new entertainment forms (Facebook’s gaming population is massive, as one example).

After all, in checking back through this blog’s archives, I’ve invested around 3 years in this version of the site, which only exists virtually on my hosts servers, and on a hard drive backup.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Videogames Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
  • http://djdoubledown.blogspot.com Doubledown Tandino

    Mashable has always been a very close-minded source, especially considering the hypocrisy that they are in the social media & new media world, which is supposed to be about open lines of communication & crowdsource collaborative knowledge. However, Mashable has always been arrogant in this regard: They want to be the king, and decide what and who is valid, important, and legitimate. They want to call the shots, and then release it to the public at large. Once Mashable gets off their high horse, they will discover a whole new world… in fact, a bunch of whole new worlds… for now, they're stuck on trying to predict trends, declaring themselves right, finding dinky start-ups and declaring em revolutionary, etc… meanwhile, Mashable fails to realize that Twitter and Facebook aren't all that…. those were 2009. I hope they decide to open their eyes.

  • http://www.thewayoftheweb.net Dan Thornton

    Thanks for the comment – personally I don't have anything against Mashable, and I'm a big advocate of both Twitter and Facebook. But I do think many people and particularly blogs/news sources tend to overlook a lot of interesting things which are happening online due to current bandwagons and fads.
    Even many of the people who talk about concentrating on engagement rather than total audience numbers appear to be susceptible – there are great communities in places like Second Life, for example, which are being overlooked because it's now seen as old news and not growing as quickly as Twitter, for example.

  • http://www.pookymedia.com/ pookyamsterdam

    You have obviously also Invested your time, and the Return on your Human Investment (ROHI) can't be measured quantitively entirely, but must be done so qualitively. Spending time on entertainment developed on the Second Life platform which is immersive, dynamic and motivating in many ways, I have observed that “Sit back & Relax” has become “Lean Forward & Engage.” I don't see us, humans becoming more passive in the next decade as far as our entertainment needs go. That means we will seek the tools of engagment we can control at our own pace.
    Branded content development is also going to move into the virtual realm (Pooky prediction 2010)
    - For example, I can't help but wonder what would it have cost Pepsi to “sponsor” that space station on Entropia?

  • http://www.thewayoftheweb.net Dan Thornton

    There was certainly an influx of businesses into virtual worlds a few years ago, although most companies appear to have pulled back again now. Instead they're increasingly investing in product placements in online games for consoles – so a different form of virtual world, or looking at casual social games…
    But I'd guess that they'll return to virtual worlds again in the future. The hardware barriers that afflict PC games are constantly reduced and costs are constantly coming down in line with Moore's Law…

  • http://djdoubledown.blogspot.com Doubledown Tandino

    The minuscule amount of companies that have “pulled back” are the ones that are read about…. Inworld, the companies and corps that are doing it right are active and blossoming. There's nothing but increase. 1 out of 50 companies, who don't understand how to do it right, pull out, and then press release their failures. Out-of-world mainstream sees that, not the real news as to what is actually happening inworld.

  • http://www.sheeparcade.com Free Games

    I look on this topic perhaps because seeing how Zynga have made a big profit from virtual goods. If I had the money and time, I think I would try to make investments in this kind of virtual worlds.