Online users
- Stigg
WoW Inc.
Casual observers of the massively-multiplayer world could be forgiven for thinking this is all rather silly. It's just a game, after all. For all the assets your red-suspendered day-trader elf accumulates, he's still just a fictional entity, and his wealth is just a set of ones and zeroes in some hulking database somewhere, subject to change at any time. - from here It is a soft read, but what I actually found interesting was the article that delved into ranking Everquest as a GDP! You see, on Saturday I went to a friends house to see the new ninja PC in action. And it is a beast, a Q9650 extreme, 8gb of DDR3-1600 ram, oodles of disk space and a couple of Radeon 3870 X2 (I hope I got all the numbers right) to power that lovely, widescreen monitor. I was in awe. Then flipped through Entropia and one of the player run shops. And that took my breath away!There is a virtual shopping mall where you can exhibit any items you like. Now it costs around $100 per month to rent a shop floor and you can have up to 4 levels in the mall, but you should see some of the prices! A Desert Nomad Overcoat. It's an overcoat. But because it is a rare drop and has only been seen 58 times it has a value of 3800 odd PED. Or $38. And that is but one item in a fashion boutique that holds hundreds, all textured and coloured and available for purchase. And another shop was selling artwork, with a link through to the artists homepage if you wanted the real ones.
I don't know why, but I love virtual economies. I love the cross over. It's a brilliant thing.
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So right now I am surrounded by some of the most brilliant and young computer scientists or computer engineers I think I will ever meet. The company I am visiting handwrote the code for the simulator. Anyways, I was talking with a few of these guys when anohter employee there walked by and said "I got 5 star general last nite!" Looking at this man I realized he wasn't talking about in real life...(Is there eve 5 star generals!?!?!?!) Anyways, he was talking about CoD4. Which brought up all theo other games out there. Dan, the companies lead software engineer (at the age of 24) plays just about every game there is. One of the ld army guys walked by and kinda laughed at us. Dan turned to him and said, "Well, if nothing else, it lets me pad my pockets." A long discussion followed.
Dan plays WoW (on Tich.../roll eyes...), CoD4, Second Life, LotRO (not on Brandywine), and a bunch of others. He claims he pulls in over $2k a month playing games. He sells arena ratings in WoW, and in turn, he sells the gold he makes to some chinese company for $75 for 1000g. He has multiple second life marketplaces, selling "land", clothes, and gadgets. He does something with CoD4 that nets him money....although I am not certain of what....and on top of all of that, he works developing new map layouts for a bunch of older games, which he sells for a few dollars per map....which after a few thousand downloads....the $2 or whatever he charges adds up pretty quick.
Anyways, it was incredibly interesting to hear him talk about all of this. The army guy seemed impressed....Dan just kind of said, "Its a hobby that I make more money with than most people my age make."
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