WTF?

[TPRJones]

It's got an EXTREMELY robust player economy. While it's true only a very few actually use it to make large amounts of money, calling it a pyramid scheme is misleading. It's a pyramid scheme in the same way that any economy is a pyramid scheme: whatever system you set up only a few will be successful with it and amass large quantities of capital. Most people are just part of the monetary churn. And about three-quarters of the incoming churn of in-game cash is coming from the company itself (they make tons on selling server resources, the bleeding of corporate cash into the in-game economy is a loss leader for them).

I did indeed play for awhile, and I made a couple of hundred dollars in the process. The scripting language is only slightly ass, but you can get it to do a lot of interesting things. As to money makers in the game, the biggest are definately the virtual real estate agents. Some of them are paying the company running SL several thousand a month, but making much much more in rent and property sales. Below them you've got people making various types of objects (mostly clothing and skins, and more than a few furry avatars), people selling gadets of various types (vehicles and poseball systems, for example), and people selling various types of entertainment (gambling halls, nightclubs, DJs, and of course hookers).

My cash came mostly from gadgets and clothing. I made a few interesting items that sold a few hundred units at reasonable prices (a trampoline, a globe of the earth showing day and night accurately with orbiting moon showing accurate phases, a few interesting moving sculptures, a sunflower that followed the in-game sun, a spotlight system for nightclubs). I had some popular cothing that hadn't been done before (a toolbelt, color-changing sunglasses). But the biggest chunk came from a simple gadget that swept a plot of land looking for bugs and malicious scripts, then reporting items and locations to the owner. You'd be surprised at the level of spying on each other that people in that game are doing. I sold a lot of those for a hefty sum.

As far as player-developed content goes, SL is lightyears ahead of anything else. It even beat NWN all to hell and gone (but then SL isn't really a game per se, so it's not really a fair comparison). Yes it's about 60% porn and another 20% crap, but so is internet and we still use it.

(For more on that bit about the company making much of their income selling server space, check out this link. A paying account gets a tiny plot of land if so desired, but if you want to build anything of any real size - and most people buying land do - you start forking over more cash. Last time I was on there were over 1000 regions, which is easily over three-hundred grand a month just in server space fees.)

[TPRJones]

The rest of the players are the ones who will be buying that product. And how do they earn in world cash without true in world jobs and such? They buy virtual dollars with real world dollars.

Some do, but most don't. Linden Labs actually provides the largest influx of in-game cash. Linden Labs pays every active player a weekly stipend for being active.



Edited By TPRJones on 1197609673