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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. So 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 favorite 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 $1.68 million a year. I'm calling that the successful low end.
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 realize 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. And 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, and 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. And 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 labor 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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any hair brained idea can make money. This is just a case of the
useless capitalizing on the gullible.
Just think what all this energy could do in a real life.
Don't be jealous that someone can think out of the box and earn money in a virtual world while you flip burgers.
In online gaming worlds where the exchange of real world money can be converted into that world?s money (or straight out used) you will see a new paradigm in economics rise. Most people don't see it because they are still tied to the old thoughts of brick & mortar businesses and real properties. But there is a HUGE segment of the world (that's right the WORLD) that game and 'live' virtually in various games and these people are learning more about economy in these worlds (and in general) than any college could ever teach them. Soon they will be earning more money than most of those millionaires that you see in the media.
All you need to do to see where its going is to do a search on eBay for any of the popular MMOGs (World of Warcraft, Everquest, EVE Online, etc.) and see people already earning something of a living off virtual goods. In the case of SOE they even are trying to leverage the market for their own profit. That would say something to anyone with more than a high school education.
There are still purists in many game worlds that hate and fight against the ?farmer? and gold merchants in many of the above worlds. In cases where the game doesn't support or approve of selling in game goods I agree with them. But in those games (Second Life, Project Entropia, ???) where it's "legal" to buy and sell stuff for real world money I see no problem with what he's done. I only wish I had the money and the moxy to do it too.
So in short, you need to get a grip on the coming wave. They are not gullible or useless, these residents of the online worlds. They are the future economic giants, the movers and shakers, of the next era. Not all of them but certainly many of them. To be dismissive is to wallow in your own ignorance.
Why not try a free multiuser 3d space station thats been online for years...no cost, games, chat, more..
www.starbasec3.com
cube3
- by chriskameir January 19, 2009 4:30 PM PST
- Read why Richard Nixon is the inventor of the virtual economy: http://kameir.com/virtual-economy.html
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