Gamer Spends $330,000 on a Virtual Item
I love videogames, I love them to death. But honestly, I could never spend what I considered an insane amount of money on a object that is not real. But apparently there are people out there, that are willing to shell out huge sums of money to pixelated objects. Don’t believe me? Well, just take “Buzz Eric Lightyear” for example. The guy plays a free MMORPG game called Entropia Universe, where players are supposed to colonize a untamed planet named Calypso. While the game is free to download, the title uses its own currency called Project Entropia Dollars, or PED for short.
One way people get PEDs is by actually using their own money, and one $1 USD equals to $10 PED. While you might think the title sounds like a snore, and you believe there is no way the developer, MindArk, makes any kind of cash off the title — you would be wrong. So far, according to them, the turnover has been $3.6 Billion PEDs, or $360 Million USD — aka real money.
Because there is a lot of cash being made off the MMO, some players have to be spending a crap-load, which brings me back to this “Buzz Eric Lightyear” guy. According to reports, he recently just dropped $330,000 of real money to purchase his own virtual space station, that orbits Planet Calypso.
Now before you make fun of him, which I already have and I’m sure you will too, make sure you understand that his newly acquired space station will actually be a virtual business, and he’ll even make real money in the end. Apparently, anyone can hang out in this station and while they are there, they can hunt and shop. Since”Lightyear” owns the business, he has the ability to set the tax rates of everything, which in the end turns into REAL cash in his REAL pocket.
Everyone says you should make money off of something you enjoy, so I guess you could say he just took the phrase to the extreme.
January 7th, 2010 at 12:18 am
That’s an insane amount of a money to put down on a game. Although, if the game does well at making money and has enough dedicated users, than he’ll likely be the one with the last laugh. In the end, he may have made a good business decision and in that case, well done Mr. Lightyear.
It’s surprising to see how much money is going into the virtual worlds online these days. My girlfriend, sadly, put down money for a Facebook game, and I’m sure there’s plenty of other Facebook users who did the same. The future is certainly in the world of online.