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Second Life produces MMO's 1st millionaire.
Motorhead
Member UncommonPosts: 1,193
Anshe Chung, a real-estate tycoon in the digitally simulated world known as Second Life, has apparently become the first virtual millionaire--i.e., someone whose holdings in a make-believe world are legally convertible into genuine U.S. currency worth more than $1 million.
Chung is the nom de keyboard of Ailin Graef, a former schoolteacher who says she was born and raised in Hubei, China, and is now a citizen of Germany. She will give a press conference about her achievement tomorrow (November 28) at 9:00 a.m. PST, although it will occur in-world, i.e., to attend you will need to have downloaded Second Life's software from the company that created and maintains it, Linden Lab. Here is Chung's announcement, which has additional details. (A spokesperson for Linden Lab told me she could not immediately verify Chung's claim, because Chung's property is held in many different names, but hopes to have the information by later today.)
I wrote about Chung a little bit in a Fortune feature story in November 2005, called "From Megs to Riches," which focused on the broader phenomenon of people earning real money from activities they engage in while playing online games. That story is available here. (In all candor, at this point, every major news organization has written at least one such story, and a fair number of those were published before mine.)
Second Life's creators and denizens do not like it to be called a game--you don't shoot at monsters while you're there, for instance--but it might be categorized nonetheless as a special variety of so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game (or MMORPG for relatively short), albeit one that is more akin to SimCity than to World of Warcraft. In Second Life, subscribers get a tool kit that enables them to build and create an avatar (a character in the world). They also get a small quantity of Linden dollars to start out with, enabling the participant to buy additional tools and objects within the world itself. Linden Lab converts currency at a floating rate that, at the moment, is about 257 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar.
Though you can buy additional Linden dollars from Linden Lab by paying U.S. currency, Chung says she has made all her additional Linden dollars via in-world buying, building, trading, and selling. The lion's share of it, she says, has been made by buying, developing, and then renting or reselling "land"--i.e., control over the virtual real estate simulated by Linden's servers. Each of Linden Lab's servers simulates about 16 acres of in-world property. At the time I wrote my article in November 2005, Chung was developing private islands and setting up communities restricted to, for instance, East Asian, Victorian, or Gothic architecture, or to French-speakers, or to gays and lesbians, or to fuzzy avatars known as "furries." Because Linden Lab has added simulation servers more slowly than it has accumulated subscribers, virtual property values have soared.
Why, you may wonder, do I consider Chung's achievement to be a suitable topic for a legal affairs blog? Well, it's a bit of a stretch. But, as I explained in my earlier feature story, the whole topic of buying and selling "virtual" property does raise legal issues. Some online game companies have attempted to prohibit, through click-through agreements, the real-world buying and selling of online property created by players, which the companies maintain remains the company's intellectual property--indeed, just graphical manifestations of data entered into company-owned spreadsheets on company-owned servers. Second Life, on the other hand, openly authorizes and facilitates exchanges between its currency and real-world currencies, so that particular legal issue does not arise. Still, you might ask whether Linden Lab is courting legal liability if its servers should suddenly go down one day, destroyed, say, in some real-world earthquake, leaving Second Life denizens devoid of "property" or at least expectations in which they've invested so much real time and money. What do people think?
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"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb." -- Batman
Comments
I think if she has a million dollars worth of property, she better find a way to cash out before Linden decides to have a "server glitch" and wipe her out
Edit: on that same note, since LL are the ones that deided the value of ingame cash by selling it for real money, i am wondering if this would make them legally liable to have to pay her full value in reverse. They may end up regretting their money market setup by the time all is said and done.
...Maybe I should be playing Second Life.
That damn Joel might have been on to something.
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"Io rido, e rider mio non passa dentro;
Io ardo, e l'arsion mia non par di fore."
-Machiavelli
Nah, Joel plays "There", remember? Bet he trades games now.
Interesting article. Is there a limit to the amount you can cash-out per month or can she take out one million all at once?
I tried Second Life for about half an hour, very boring, it's like a virtual reality social scene, nothing ever happens. It's not even a game...there's absolutely nothing to do.
Entropia Universe has the same kind of hype surrounding making money through virtual reality, this game is hella boring too, not even a game as well.
I have no idea why people would buy virtual property let alone socialize in cyberspace when the game itself isn't really a game. It's basically a 3D chat room. Why is that a game? *Shrug*
All games are pointless. Some have pre-defined goals you work towards, while others are more of a sandbox nature where you choose what you want to do yourself. I've noticed that when the latter is the case, most people will just go "so what am I supposed to do?" and quit.
Ryzom suffered from people like this quite a bit, especially considering all the WoW refugees who are so used to questing start to finish.
Once they realized how much she had they probably made a deal with her on a cash out. In exchange for that article and the conference.
Otherwise she would never get anywhere close to a million if she decided to quit SL. Remember though as well that is assets which means she had to spend the money first before she could claim it as such.
As far as 2nd life ? its a place for people with no lives to hang out. The people that actively play it have a very hard time distinguishing between what is real and what is not. Also everywhere you go its ike a cyber porn experience. Not much else goes on in between the times that people are spending RL cash on the game.
You dont "cash out" in SL. Linden Labs isnt the one who pays you the money. Instead, players buy and sell currency amongst themselves. And it isnt like Ansche Chung garnered all this ingame money and is turning it in all at once. On the contrary, they (as it is a husband and wife, not just a single person although the wife is the one who technically owns the account) have been turning those Linden Dollars into real cash for quite some time now. This isnt an announcement that they've made a million in virtual money and are turning it into real cash, but that their total earnings so far have topped a million.
And as for those who have played it for half an hour and decided it's nothing but porn, that's what you get for looking at only one aspect of SecondLife. Try checking out the thriving business community, or perhaps the avid Sailing and Flying communities, or perhaps the people who have worked hard to create sims with exploration puzzles, or recreations of real life places such as Paris, or fictional cities like Midnight City.
million of real dollars invested in in-game currencies with such a
small community... Unless it is played by millionaires who dont realy
care about it.
I mean, who would spend 100 real dollars to "buy" virtual property just
to... have it. I mean, I could undestand why people do buy rare weapons
or items in games like WoW, becuase items often define how good they
are. But with second life, the ONLY thing u gain from an object, is a
social benefit, not a tangible one. I mean sure, you can "rent" your
virtual land to virtual people, but when u take out all the middle
stuff, at the end nothing is SL serves any purpose other then visual
art. Im not saying there is anything wrong with that, I just dont
understand how anyone could pay for anything that is not real AND will
NEVER belong to you. You can own a painting, a statue, maybe some
virtual objects ON your computer (lots of people who are into digital
art buy-sell art that you can use on your computer to create your own
masterpiece in Poser, Bryce, Max3d, Maya, etc) but not on someone
else's computer. Anygame you play will state that you do not "own"
anything, you are only paying to access that content.
So if u do buy an object from SL, lets say a house, and then SL devs go
bankrupt or just decide to shutdown the servers. Whats gonna happen to
all the content you paid money for? Gone? Will you be bale to download
it to your computer? If you can DL it to your PC, will it still has its
original value or its just gonna be a worthless collection of stuff
that you cant even show to your friends?
I dunno. Its hard to judge something I know almost nothing about, and what I know I heard from other people's posts.
I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y239/Tabatron/Fading-SWGEMU.gif
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y239/Tabatron/Fading-SWGEMU.gif
I would imagine income tax could still be applied though?
I bet thousands of people are joining Second Life even right now, hoping to cash in.
The problem is that it's usually about timing, and noticing an opportunity before others do. I remember when I was playing Magic the Gathering in my youth, and people were making thousands of dollars by selling cards - but it was always those guys who got into it first who made money, and others who came after mainly just fed their business. Someone who starts SL now will find that there isn't anything they could buy low and sell high, since pioneers like the one(s) in that article already bought all the cheap stuff. They have to buy high and hope that prices go up, which is risky in what amounts to a bubble economy.
Well i just tried the free trial of second life and i ahve to say it is the most messiest game ive ever played and the hardest to move around in. The tutorial island was ok pretty tidy and all that and little lag. It was when i went onto the main server that things started to show there true colours.
Imagine a green hilly land chocker block full of pyramids houses spaceships and cows in the sky.....Yes you read right cows in the sky
Basically what you will soon see is that there is a lot of litter littering the sky's usually consisting of random object suspended in the sky. And there is no organisation to it at all.
Also the way its all loaded is wrong as you fly around sometimes you suddenly reach a patch with a few incomplete buidings that suddely begine rebuilding themselvs in front of your eyes. Now what can happen is that you can get stuck between wall as i was for ages till i managed to free myself.
Also all over the plave there are special access walls where people have restricted access to therer bit of land, problem is you dont see these walls till you bounce off them. Sometimes this can make nqavigated almost impossable.
Now what can be done in this second life you ask? Pretty easy to answer this is you can gamble $$$'s in casinos or you can go to an escort building where you can ahve virtuall 'sex' with a badly rederd male organ. And you can also.....well to tell the truth ive just described 90% of what there is in second life sex and gambling.