Second Life

[rizzix]

http://secondlife.com/

From what i've gathered it's an MMORPG. The coolest thing about this one (if i'm not mistaken) is that, u can exchange the "gaming" currency for real currency (and visa-versa). The game economy directly (or indirectly (depends on ur perspective)) interacts with the "real" economy.

How cool is that?

[Hikaru79]

rizzix wrote:

The coolest thing about this one (if i'm not mistaken) is that, u can exchange the "gaming" currency for real currency

...they'll *pay* you to play the game?

[Tony]

apparently

You get L$250 for a free sign up, and then L$50 more per week in "allowance". That's $1.12 + $0.22/week based on exchange rate I found.

[Dan]

I have hured of this game b4 tho i never realy bougth in to it. Somthing about it seems off.....

[Tony]

the way I understand, they've created an engine that gives users some "tools" to develop in-game content. The idea is quite simple.. get some bored kids from collage to model/skin/program content for them, allow those kids to "sell" virtual content to other users for L$.

Now a "developer" would be motivated because they could make few real dollars out of this. Though the game now has this new armor class that everybody wants, and it costs them L$.

The only source of L$ is from GMs. You can't go out and mine for gold as you can in WoW. That means to get that new shiny armor, you got to ether wait 2 months, or dish out few bucks.

Since GMs are the only source of L$ (and they have unlimited amount), they set an artificial exchange rate.

Basically unless you develop in-game content that others would actually want to use, you'd have to pay for EVERYTHING.

[Dan]

Ingenuses realy, takin advagte of that adticted mmorpg player. When you think of it is is surpsing that other devlopers have not thought of this. Why not sell the virutal crap that is worthless insteled of having others sell it of ebay?

[Tony]

exactly.. if the MMORPG is any good, you'll sell your buddy's sword for $400 and try to not get killed afterwards.

The problem is exploits. You've got to be really secure, since the virtual number on their servers is linked to the virtual number in a real-world bank.

Is such a setup covered by any laws/regulations? For example, a casino must carry all of their chips worth of cash, at any given time. Similarly, if EVERY user decides to sell off their currency, would the company have enough to cover that?

[Dan]

A better question is whould they even have to? Since there user argment could vrey well state some where in small text that at any time they could stop or take away your virutal money.

Also there problem are no laws about having to give poeleop money for playing a online game. esplaty when it is free to play.