Virtual: The Hard to Believe Market

There appears to be money in building castles in the sky…and selling them.

An excerpt from Jonathan V. Last’s article in The Weekly Standard:

In early 2005, for instance, a man named David Storey paid $26,500 for a virtual "Treasure Island" in the game Project Entropia. Later that year Jon Jacobs paid $100,000--remember, we are talking about real, U.S. dollars--for a virtual space station in the same game. Mind you, these aren't simply kids playing a game for fun--they are speculators hoping to get rich from the virtual economy. After his mammoth purchase, Jacobs told the tech website CNET, "I've seen the potential of it all, and I've gone through it, and I learned my lesson, and my lesson was that I can't afford not to do this. I could not afford not to get the space resort. It's too valuable. The guy that bought the Treasure Island recouped his investment in a year."

Jacobs was probably influenced by the success of a Second Life player known as Anshe Chung, whose virtual land and currency holdings are estimated to be in the neighborhood of $1 million. (Second Life is the only MMORPG that gives actual property rights to players.)

That's the high end of the virtual market. If you go to eBay or any number of other websites you can find people selling virtual belongings or even avatars for smaller, but still significant, sums. A weapon could be as cheap as $50. An avatar might cost several hundred or even a couple thousand dollars. Virtual real estate--land, castles, buildings--is, as a rule, more expensive.