A WoW Failure
I hate to admit defeat, but my experiment with trying the World of Warcraft (WoW) Massively Multiplayer Online Game is about to end.
I simply never got into the fantasy online environment. It didn’t help that I limited my experiment to weekends, not to mention that I invested very little time. Sorry folks, the WoW experience was boring to me. Now I just need to figure out how to cancel my $15 per month WoW subscription.
Here’s a Fortune article about online game economies, the aspect of MMOGs that first caught my attention because of Second Life.
[tease]
Paul is one of a growing number of people who either make their living or supplement their income through businesses catering to needs that arise only in virtual worlds. Anshe Chung, for instance, is the in-game character, or “avatar,” created by a German woman who teaches school near Frankfurt. Since March 2004, Chung has accumulated more than $200,000 worth of in-game currency and “land holdings” by conducting businesses inside a serene synthetic world called Second Life. Chung buys “land” there, builds communities using tools provided by the game developers, and then rents or resells plots to other players. Second Life is a world simulated by 1,400 servers run by a San Francisco company called Linden Lab. The money Chung earns is convertible to dollars over an exchange run by Linden Lab.
Estimates of the size of the nascent market in virtual property range widely—from about $200 million to $1 billion worldwide—but most industry observers agree that it is increasing at a breakneck pace, possibly 100% year over year. Because it involves commerce between imaginary worlds and the real one (known to some gamers as “meat space”), it raises knotty questions. The things Paul and Anshe trade, for instance, are merely the graphical manifestations of data entered into spreadsheets owned by Sony and Linden Lab. Do they constitute “property” recognizable by U.S. courts? If so, whose?
[via David Card]