Someone just sold property in a video game for $600k real dollarz. - Page 2

There's a "high sucker theory" in trading. I suspect this is no different But for someone with way too much money, he does it knowing full well someone is gonna take note and post about his exploits on off-site forum such as this. Ever been to a Sotheby's auction? As soon as anything goes over 2M, the winner is always a telephone buyer. The suckers sitting in the room just shake their heads.

We won't even get started with the auction sites, what with chandelier bidding...

Fair point, but the risk profile for this "asset" class seems extremely high. Of course, some folks obviously seem to be making it work.

When I went off to university I sold all my Diablo II items. I made just over 4k.

What kind of morons would pay money for items that got duped some rampantly? Or did they solve that problem in D2? I only played the original, in which you pretty much logged into a game and were immediately handed Godly equipment by some dude standing outside the dungeon.

+1

I can't for the life of me understand the appeal of games like second life. I used to sell stuff in MMOs but most of it had utility in-game.

That said, I know there was a pretty big rares market in UO. Rares were essentially objects that you could use to decorate your house/tower/castle. Some people just wanted their place to be unique.

Duping was pretty much fixed by the time I left the game. Blizzard cut down on duplicates heavily, and any that were still around had to be taken care of. (Logging out incorrectly would allow them to be deleted. I sold one item that was duped for around 50, and the original for 400+.

This is all stored in a computer / server somewhere, none of the items are tangible. The day the server goes off-line, you lose everything... because its not real. Why would you buy non-existant goods?!?!?

Remember the pretty much useless but crimson armour in vanilla and RoK? Same deal.

Yes.

I don't know AB. I think the gaming world is now "fully developed". Just as in a developed economy, where on-site manufacturing (of a physical product) is no longer important, we will likely see $$$ for random stuff like this. I mean, just 9 years ago, if someone were to say they paid 2M for a domain name, people would call him George Bush. The XXX adult industry is going in a similar direction.

Actually there is not infinite supply when it comes to 3d Modeled objects such as clothes. In fact demand in these types of games outstrips supply of quality goods usually. I know it sounds strange but I actually wrote a paper on Virtual Economics a year or so ago. It blew my mind when I found out how much real money is spent on virtual goods (From Zynga's Farmville to Warcraft to these types of platforms).

Buts its not that shocking once you think about it. Second Life and Entropia have thousands and tens of thousands of users. Many of them derive much of their social interaction from online games. So because it is a visual chat like you mentioned (emphasis on visual), many of the players are going to want clothes and other items in game to function "socially in game".

I know it might not make sense to a lot of people but virtual goods has been a greatly expanding market the last 10 years or so. A good book on this topic is Play Money by Julian Dibbel who gave up his real job to try to make money selling virtual property in one of those early MMOs.

Unlike games like Warcraft and other MMO types, players can basically make their own clothes in professional 3d Apps like Autodesk's Maya and 3DS Max and then sell them to the entire player base. So people that have graphic design skills (many people are probably pro or semi-pro graphic artists) can certainly earn some money on the side.

Now maybe you or I don't have a use for spending money virtually but there are certainly people that do derive "use value" from these goods (just look at Zynga's sales in Farmville).

And finally heres a recent article of interest on Zynga being valued higher than Electronic Arts:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-1...ods-surge.html