Virtual World, Real Money

In the interactive business, we often labor for months on a project and then deliver it to our client with the click of the FTP button. Occasionally we will deliver physical assets such as CDs or printed materials, but more often than not our deliverable is made of virtual bits.

Lately I’ve been seeing this concept taken to the extreme. Why be kind-of virtual when you can be the virtualest!? The proliferation of online virtual worlds and internet-based role playing games have opened a vast new market for goods and services that exist only inside the computer machine.

For example, late last year Anshe Chung (not her real name) became the first virtual real-estate tycoon to become a millionaire in the real world by selling online plots of land in SecondLife, the avatar-based online world. Players of the game shell out real-world dollars to own a piece of the ever-growing online playground.

Other similar online worlds are experiencing similar phenomenon. There.com, Active Worlds, and Project Entropia have very active online economies that bleed into “meatspace”.

And this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, I read about the Chinese “gold farmers” who put in 12-hour shifts playing World of Warcraft, collecting virtual booty that is then sold to westerners for real cash.

Earlier this year Facebook started to offer a virtual gifting service which seems to be catching on. Users can buy $1 cutsie icons to hand over to their friends. So, Facebook is essentially selling bits that allows people to say to their friends, “Don’t say I never bought you anything.” But is it really a thing? I guess it is if you paid for it, eh?

It looks like many Internet users have moved beyond the old 1990s fear of online commerce into a brave new world where you order an item and it is delivered instantly online because it is fully virtual. Watch out FedEx, the all-virtual world is sneaking up on us.