After reading the following article about the online role playing game "Project Entropia" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4104731.stm. I felt compelled to write a view on this weird situation. The article is based around the fact that a player of this game spent about £10,000 on some virtual real-estate. Intrigued I did a bit of hunting around, including the Project Entropia web site, and also at http://www.mmorpg.com/ for a slightly less biased view.
Now this sort of thing isn't entirely new, most on-line games require a payment
up front for the software and then a monthly fee. The idea of trading items on-line isn't new either, it's been happening for some time. To my cynical eye it strikes me as obvious what is really happening.
The difference about Project Entropia is that essentially the game is free (of course you need a decent internet connection), and there is no monthly fee. What you do pay for is basically everything else in the virtual world. So to
actually climb the invisible ladder you need to "invest" in your character with hard cash. The exchange rate is 10ped to $1.
I won't go in to all the details, because it is way too boring, but the idea behind this sale was that the gamer who bought it (!) would be able to raise revenue faster from other gamers by selling parts of his/her island and taxing residents or people who work there. Now this seems a bit stupid, ultimately the company that runs this thing needs to make money, so obviously they create this real-estate to sell to generate extra revenue, and everything else in the game is some way or another getting money to them eventually. From what I've read I gather that if you do make a profit and try to get out of the game it can take a very long time to get hold of any real money! So ultimately something which seems quite cheap is in fact one of the most expensive games of this kind.
More fundamentally is the social aspect of this game, this is roughly the way the world works anyway. People with the majority of the power and money use it as alternately a carrot or a stick in which to control the masses. So why play it in a game and risk losing twice? I read one review that used the phrase "pyramid marketing", well I agree. Sounds like the price is too high in this case...
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