Playing the wrong MMO...

[Xyzed]

Planet Calypso.
I played this game years ago. Tried it for a few weeks and just couldn't get into it. The nerds who play it are addicted. Like really addicted. So much so that they spend insanes amounts of real life money for ingame items. They even destroy Eve when it comes to in game things becoming real life value.
I saw a documentary last year about some guy who's wife died, he sells his house uses the money to buy an ingame space station. The cost? $330,000 USD. Yes, $330,000 USD, real life money. Anyways, another big sale happened this weekend. An egg, which holds an item inside that is a mystery sold for $69,000USD
69 fucking thousand dollars for an item that contains an unknown item.
I think it's time to start playing just so I can sell rare shit to Internet nerds for bajillions of dollars.


Unique Virtual Egg Sold For Over $69,000 USD


Goteborg, Sweden - February 5, 2010 - First Planet Company, developer and publisher of the largest real money Massively Multiplayer Online Game, announced today the sale of a legendary Virtual Egg for a n a stunning $69,696.00 USD. This comes on the heels of the Crystal Palace Station’s recent sale for a record-breaking $330,000.00 USD.

Jon "NEVERDIE" Jacobs held a public auction Sunday , inside Planet Calypso, and sold the Virtual Egg to David Storey aka Deathifier. Deathifier owns "Treasure Island" in the game, a t ax generating Virtual World Destination . NEVERDIE purchased the Virtual Egg for $10,000 USD in 2006 from a gamer who c ompleted a unique q uest. The Final Chapter in the Egg’s History has yet to be written as thousand s of players speculate what will actually hatch from the it and if it will be worth the e xtraordinary price tag.

Deathifier purchased "Treasure Island" with hunting and mineral Rights in 2004 for $27,500 USD and reportedly earned his investment back within the year. NEVERDIE mortgaged his home in Miami in 2005 to purchase an Asteroid for $100,000 USD. NEVERDIE turned the Asteroid into a NightClub dubbed Club NEVERDIE, which is now valued at over $1 million USD . NEVERDIE and Deathifier have both been featured in the Guinness B ook of World Records for their a stounding Virtual Transactions.

"The s ale of the Atrox Queen Egg is another example of the incredibly unique world and economy we offer in our game. While you don’t need thousands of dollars, or even tens of dollars to play Planet Calypso, it’s sales like these that truly separate our virtual world from any other on the planet," said Marco Behrmann, CEO of First Planet Company. "We are introducing a new quest system soon and the epic price tag of this Egg, which was a quest treasure itself, will energize a new generation of virtual pioneers looking to make their mark."

First Planet Company is the developer and publisher of Planet Calypso, the largest real economy Massively Multiplayer Online Game in the world. Players have the ability to participate in a unique virtual world where they only pay for the game when they play. Its innovative real money economy uses a virtual currency which has a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar. This allows players to deposit and withdraw real funds for their adventures on Calypso or in the real world. It is also the first MMORPG to use CryTek’s stunning CryENGINE 2 for amazing graphics and physics. Planet Calypso is the oldest planet in the Entropia Universe and is free to download.

Planet Calypso is a free download available at the game’s website, www.planetcalypso.com.

[thedukey]

entropia is another name the game, or the universe its in goes by , i read about the $330k sale under the name entropia

[Xyzed]

The game used to be called Project Entropia when I played it. It has since went through a name change and also a game engine change (It now runs under CryEngine 2)

[Dekel]

I wonder how a real guild would do in that game.

Do they have real guilds?

[thedukey]

im not sure, do you have to pay money to actually get playing? or eventually get to a point where you HAVE to spend money?

[Xyzed]

No. The game is free to play. The in game currency is bought with real money. 1 USD = 10 in game PED. You can earn PED in game by doing stuff for people, like being a mule bitch etc,, For the guns and shit you need ammo, which costs PED. So that can be a point where you may need to spend money, but it is possible to start with nothing and build wealth totally within game. Cool thing is, you can withdraw your in game PED for real world money through the games system. Make a 1000 PED in game and make a withdraw and 100 USD will be deposited to your bank/card.

[tricknasty]

what ! you can just go farm stuff and cash out for real money? oh hell yes

[thedukey]

wish it was that simple ..takes FOREVER to start without putting in money or having help

[Icirus]

Classic Ponzi Scheme.

[bwar]

yeah I think I made $0.10 first time I tried this game

[Failwin]

To long did not read no video no point kthnx

[Xyzed]

Your name suits you well.
Here's a video for people like Failwin that can't read more then text messages that look like this
"brah, sme guy spnt 330k 4 ingame sht,sme othr guy spnt 69k ( lol 69) on a egg. wtf!!?1?!1"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2sVm2fXtzA

[Ganrax]

I remember this game, me, Qel-Droma and a few others tried it years ago when we were still in SWG(I think right before LOTRO). Couldn't get into it because of first person and pretty shitting graphics/confusing gameplay but heard some cool stuff about it. Apparently a lot of the game(at least back then) was unexplored and you could make money from mining certain stuff or hunting and selling loot to other players. You could then turn that ingame money into real money with a certain exchange rate from ingame money to dollars. Also allowed you to do it the other way around as well, use real money to buy ingame money through the game instead of gold farmers.

[Ganrax]

And I think the guy that spent $300k is a complete retard. Sure I can see why he did it, he thinks he can make a bigger profit off of people using his space station but investing that kind of money in hopes to make a profit in a Video Game(an MMO at that, which have a history of falling apart at the most inconvenient times) is completely idiotic at best. He would have been much better taking that money and investing it in something more concrete and not as unpredictable as an MMO. All it would take is for someone to create a new MMO just like the one he's playing with a better engine, updated graphics, and better gameplay and it would take people from that game causing him to lose more chances at making that $300k back let alone a profit.

[Xyzed]

Actually, it was a very smart move. He did not take a large risk. The space station Crystal Palace did not exist. He paid the game developers to make it for him. That prices was 330k. The space station is packed with apartment suites with a view of the rotating planet below. He already had "sold" these and had buyers lined up, buying them for 5k-20k a piece. Yes, 5k to 20k REAL money. He made all his money back plus a profit and continues to make money of taxes/rent etc. This guy is a freaking genius.
Who are the idiots? The fucking morons who spent 20k REAL money for the fucking apartment on the space station. Those are the people who need help as they paid insane prices for virtual property.

[Failwin]

Second life is also for the rich and those that have to much money on hand.

[Psypher]

The space station was a high risk high reward investment. To some people 300k isnt very much money. To us it's 3+ years of income. If I had that kind of money to throw around I would probably try little gimmicks like that too. Some of those get rich quick schemes end up turning poor people rich and rich people wealthy.

[Goodwin]

I dunno Ganrax, if there are real hardcore fanbois in this strange game, just making a newer version of the game might not kill it. Look at WoW and Aion. Aion has better graphics and a better engine but people still play WoW.

I don't know the guy or why he spent the 330k but I can say that investing in video games is a lot more stable than any government or stock investment you can make with 330k currently. I'd like to see how much of a return the guy has made so far and if/when he gets enough returns to cover the 330k.

[Dunki]

installing...

[Xyzed]

So Forbes did an interview with the guy who bought the egg for 60k and some other shit. The island that he bought for 26kUSD? yah, it makes him 100k USD a year. Real life money....holy fawk.

The World's Most Expensive Island--Online

Why sales of virtual goods are soaring.

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- What is the most you're willing to pay for a virtual item in a videogame or virtual world? Five, ten dollars? How about $26,500?

That's the amount David Storey, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Sydney, Australia, paid for a virtual island, the "Most valuable object that is virtual," according to Guinness World Records.

It's easy to write off Storey, who goes by the name "Deathifier," as a geek gone wild, but he now owns a million-dollar empire. Storey runs Amethera Treasure Island, which he purchased in the virtual world Entropia, as a rare game preserve and taxes hunters on his land. Storey says the taxes bring in more than $100,000 in real money per year.

"I thought it would be cool to own an island, and I knew I could run it and be able to pay for my play" says Storey, who has picked up skills he never imagined learning in a game. "Entropia continually evolves, so you have to constantly be watching for new developments. It's sort of like real life."

While Storey's example is extreme, buying and selling virtual goods in videogames and virtual worlds is becoming mainstream. The virtual goods market in the U.S. is estimated to reach $1.6 billion this year, up from $1 billion in 2009, according to research firm Inside Networks. And the U.S. is just a part of the worldwide market, which some experts put as high as $10 billion; countries like China and Korea are major players.

Virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like Entropia and Second Life are where virtual goods economies began. But in recent years, casual and social games like "FarmVille" and "Pet Society" on Facebook have also become important players.

Typically, virtual transactions can be divided into two categories. In one type of transaction, you "cash in," or exchange real dollars for virtual currencies, and use the virtual currencies to buy virtual goods, like a new cow in FarmVille. The other type of transaction lets you cash in and, like Storey, earn real money. In addition, virtual worlds and MMORPGs have also gotten very good at monetizing the user; industry experts estimate that the average revenues per user usually range from $10 to $20.

In comparison, social and casual games are relatively newer, less mature markets that usually only utilize "cash in" transactions. A fairly successful social game might have average revenues per user of a dollar or two. Still, Inside Virtual Goods estimates that sales from social games will make up more than half the total U.S. virtual goods revenues in 2010.

Social games are growing extremely rapidly," says Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, who has written about virtual economies. "The places where this phenomenon was birthed, like online role-playing games, have leveled off, but virtual economies are exploding in social networks like Facebook."

The most successful social games can have 10 to 20 times the number of users of virtual worlds or MMORPGs. For example, "World of Warcraft," a popular MMORPG, has more than 10 million monthly subscribers. FarmVille has some 76 million active monthly users due to its popularity on Facebook. "Instead of getting people to come where the game is at [as in MMORPGs], you put the game where people are," says Charles Hudson, an analyst at Inside Virtual Goods.

To be sure, the more mature virtual worlds and MMORPGs aren't idly standing by. Taking a page from social games, some are looking into ways to incorporate social networks and micro transactions into their frameworks.

Second Life, for instance, is considering integrating with something like Facebook Connect, and other ways to increase the social nature of the world. Tom Hale, chief product officer at Second Life parent company Linden Lab, thinks social games have had a positive impact on the overall industry. "What social games have done is make it perfectly acceptable to spend $10 in a game," says Hale.

Beyond PCs and laptops, the spread of virtual goods markets is also making its way onto other devices. Many developers have begun to replicate the model on mobile devices, especially after Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) allowed free-to-play virtual goods-supported games in its App Store just a few months ago.

Videogame consoles are also often overlooked, but they have greatly benefited from the rise of the virtual goods industry. Sony ( SNE - news - people ) says the entire PlayStation Network has brought in more than $520 million in revenue as of December 2009. Hudson estimates that Microsoft's ( MSFT - news - people ) Xbox Live is a nine-figure business.

But for all the buzz around virtual goods, you might still wonder why people are willing to pay for things that don't really exist. Susan Wu, founder of social games developer Ohai, says her game's players use virtual goods as a form of communication and as decorations on their sites. Virtual goods can also help them win games. "It's about relationship building, and things like rank and status," Wu says.

Castronova had perhaps the simplest explanation. "Why do people buy diamond earrings?" he says. "They are something that make you feel good."