Never say Neverdie in a virtual economy
Published: 30 Nov 2005 12:35 GMT
...be another guy with a little bit of rental real estate and I probably wouldn't actually see any income for a couple of years. Whereas I'd previously spent $1,000 on a small piece of land, a tiny piece of land inside "Project Entropia," and it was already yielding like $15 a day in revenue, you know, which is like $450 a month.
Where
does that revenue come from?
On my particular small piece [of land], I've got six different kinds
of monsters for hunting. I'm able to control the amount and density of
each of those monsters, as well as their maturity. So I can control
whether they're young ones that are easy to kill or if there's an
uberone that is going to cost you an arm and leg to kill. Basically, I
tax anybody that hunts my land between 1 percent and 10 percent [of the
value of what they collect]. So let's say you kill a whole bunch of
stuff and you loot $7 of cash value. I will then charge a tax on that.
If I'm charging 5 percent, I would get 35 cents. You might ask, 'Why do
I want to go and hunt on your land? Why not just go to the untaxed
land?' The reason is that I'm able to cater very specifically to
hunters' needs. I can provide the right creatures in the right density
in a convenient location.
So tell me about this space station?
Well, the space station is very special because first of all it has 10
hunting grounds. I can probably attract a total of 100 hunters an hour.
That could mean a gross turnover of $1,000 to $5,000 an hour [in looted
goods] of which I can tax between 1 percent and 10 percent, or $100 to
$500 an hour, just from hunting. There's also going to be mining
opportunities, and I get 1,000 hotel rooms. On the space station, there
is no public storage, which means that if you're a hunter or a miner,
you can't hunt for very long and get laden with too many items before
you can't move. You're going to want somewhere to store your stock, so
it's going to be worthwhile investing in an apartment. I'm also going
to have 200 shops, so hunters and crafters can exhibit their wares. But
here's the key, and this is why I did this. Why are people going to
come to this space station? One of the features is that I'm going to
have audio and visual streaming so I can bring in DJs to stream in live
DJ sets. If I'm working with top DJs, they're going to be pumping in
fantastic music, and [I can] advertise to the DJs' fan bases that they
can see their favourite DJs live in virtual reality.
So how much can you make with this?
Let's say there's 20 hours a day of hunting, times as many as 100
hunters at a time. With my 5 percent tax, that's as much as $5,000 a
day. That's $35,000 a week, $140,000 a month, or $1.68m a year. I'm
calling that the successful low end.
It sounds like a good plan, but also a little far-fetched, don't you think?
Not really. Ten years ago, I was wondering what the Internet was all
about and wondering if people could watch films online and wondering if
I should even use my credit cards online. And, well, a lot of people
today, they hear about this stuff and games and they don't realise why
virtual reality is a step beyond the Web. It's an online environment
where you get a community of people that have a far more and far
greater degree of ability to interact socially than even online because
they can relate to each other on a physical level instead of purely on
a chat level. If you've been in "EverQuest II", you know that wherever
you go, people around you are buying and selling. You walk into any
public area and people are offering this and offering that, right? It's
very much a community of trade and the money is real. And take the guy
who bought the Treasure Island. I mean, he bought it for $26,000 and 11
months later, he's got $26,000 back. He's still got the island, and if
he wants to sell it, I bet he could sell it for $100,000, so he's
probably got a 400 percent increase in the value of the real estate
itself.
You've spent all this money. Do you have any insurance in case the publisher goes out of business or they cancel the game?
I don't have a safety net in that respect. And I didn't make this
purchase lightly. I sweated about it a long time, I mean, I really did.
You know, I wanted to put more money into the Treasure Island auction
and I kind of got scared. And then I watched what happened over the
year. I've been involved in the "Project Entropia" economy for three
years, and I've frequently taken money out to pay my bills. I've drawn
out money to pay my mortgage during tight moments. I actually had paid
a deposit on a condo in South Beach and the hurricanes were coming. The
first one came and I was supposed to put down the second phase of the
deposit and I got scared and I pulled out. The American housing market
cooled off and Greenspan put the interest rates up after Hurricane
Katrina — I lost confidence in the American economy. I felt like there
was more opportunity right now in a virtual economy than in the
American economy for this kind of profit potential.
Were there a lot of other bidders for the space station?
As I understand it, there were eight other serious bidders. In fact,
the guy that bought the Treasure Island would have got it an hour
later. That tells you something. A guy that spends $26,000 was trying
to put in $100,000 to get the next piece of property. Why? He more than
anybody knows that that scale of an investment is realistic. And the
next day I was offered $200,000. I mean, it's no good to me. In the
real world you're going to have to buy a labour intensive business to
generate this kind of income. So I preferred to stick with my
investment and go for the serious revenue.
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