Hmmm. Personally, I would have bought an apartment or a talking chimp, but I guess this guy had a better idea.
The chap you see below is user “Buzz Lightyear” (real name, Eric), a hardcore player of MMO Entropia Universe. He has spent a whopping US$330,000 on in-game property, specifically, the ‘Crystal Palace Space Station’ which the game developers put up for auction in December. What I’d like to know is how he amassed such a fortune in the first place. Psht, all that money blown on a place you can’t even bring a chick back to.
The game has no purchase or subscription fee; instead, Swedish developer MindArk fills its Scandinavian coffers with micropayments. In-game objects and unique character customisations are paid for by gamers in real cash which is converted into PED (Project Entropia dollars) at a fixed exchange rate of 1 US$ = 10 PED. Like MMO Second Life, there is a bustling economy with real-world entrepreneurs that make a serious income. Entropia Universe’s 2006 gross trade amounted to a staggeringly large figure of 3.6 billion PED or 360 million in cold, papery United States dollars.
Similarly huge transactions have occurred in the past. The first (which now looks minuscule in comparison) was made by an Australian player who bought an island for $26,500 back in 2004, whilst in 2005, another in-game space-station was bought for $100,000. Sort of dwarfed by the latest sale, that’s for sure.
Make what you will of it. Ludicrous or fair-game?
Decman
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