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FROM MEGS TO RICHES
Posted Date: 22 Mar 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Computer & Technology
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Posted By: arunkumar Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 5
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From Megs To Riches
MULTIPLAYER GAMES ARE taking off, and with them a vast
and unexpected new market. People are trading imaginary
things in imaginary worlds yet making real money. Roger
Parloff of Fortune analyses this fast growing trend
“Paul” and I are seated on a plush couch in the atrium-style living
room of his starter mansion north of Dallas. A 71-inch flat-screen
HDTV dominates the far wall. His Porsche 911 Carrera and his wife’s
Lincoln Navigator nestle in the garage. It’s a good life and would not
be a surprising one for a 33-year-old corporate litigator like Paul,
except that he quit his law partnership two years ago. Since then,
he’s been self-employed at an even more lucrative calling: He plays
a medieval-themed online videogame called EverQuest.
Because so many young people now spend so much of their lives
immersed in the simulated 3-D worlds of games like this one, the
noncorporeal emoluments they accumulate in these environments—
virtual swords, cloaks, gauntlets, in-game currency etc—acquire real
value to them, and they will pay real US dollars and euros, yen,
won, and yuan to acquire them. So Paul buys and sells virtual items
and currency for a living. “The
valuation is always difficult,” he
concedes. “When you think about
people paying real cash for
something you can’t even touch,
smell, taste-that’s tough.”
Launched in 1997 and now
owned by Sony Online
Entertainment, EverQuest is one of
the increasingly popular computer
games called massively multiplayer
online role-playing games (MMO for
short). Though EverQuest has
about 300,000 player-subscribers
worldwide, a 2004 entry into the market called World of Warcraft
(made by Vivendi subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment) has become
the industry’s transformative, breakthrough blockbuster. WoW, as
it’s known, has already garnered 4.5 million subscriptions
worldwide and is expected to gross $500 million this year alonemore
than most hit movies ever earn at the box office.
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 ingame
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 US courts? If so, whose?
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