Thursday, November 18, 2010

Nightclub on Asteroid Sells for $635,000

I know what you are thinking. Surely this must be a sign of an ongoing property bubble. It's actually a great deal more bizarre than that though.

Internet estate agent sells virtual nightclub on an asteroid in online game for £400,000

Jacobs, who grew up in London, now plans to use the proceeds of the sale to further his Neverdie Studios enterprise which employs 13 people to create and design new planets for the Entropia Universe.

It is a pretend nightclub on a pretend asteroid. It sold for slightly more money than Michigan's Silverdome that sits on 127 acres and seats 80,311 people.

High-school student Mike Everest from Durango in Colorado and his mother made $35,000 (£22,000) by building and selling weapons on Entropia in 2006 - he used most of the money to pay for his siblings’ college fees.

Should you ever find yourself in a similar position here's a bit of advice. Do not to mention that you sold $35,000 worth of pretend weapons when boarding a plane unless you want your junk searched .

May the bull market in illusionary prosperity continue!

6 comments:

watchtower said...

"It is a pretend nightclub on a pretend asteroid. It sold for slightly more money than Michigan's Silverdome that sits on 127 acres and seats 80,311 people."

Yeah and that pretend nightclub never had a Super Bowl played in it either, but on the plus side it is figuratively a hell of a long way from Detroit.

Stagflationary Mark said...

watchtower,

Ouch!

I'm not much of a traveler, but I did have a connecting flight in Detroit once. We took off in Seattle and saw why Washington is the Evergreen State. As we landed in Detroit "evergray" popped into my head. It was definitely an industrial city.

EconomicDisconnect said...

Unreal story.

I'm Not POTUS said...

If the pretend nightclub owner can collect real money from people all over the world who want to pretend to visit his nightclub, 24/7/365. Then he is doing better than the chumps who are stuck in Detroit.

The guy that bought the Skydome paid less than the salvage cost of the titanium riddled retracting roof.

Considering how ridiculous the real worked have devolved into, maybe these virtual entrepreneurs are on to something.

Stagflationary Mark said...

I'm Not POTUS,

I've seen it first hand. I used to play a game called Eve Online.

There were real workers (many of them Chinese) mining pretend online asteroids for pretend minerals to sell to others within the game for pretend money that could later be sold to other players for real US Dollars in a "prohibited" manner.

Eve Online EULA

You may not transfer, sell or auction, or buy or accept any offer to transfer, sell or auction (or offer to do any of the foregoing), any content appearing within the Game environment, including without limitation characters, character attributes, items, currency, and objects, other than via a permitted Character Transfer as described in section 3 above. You may not encourage or induce any other person to participate in such a prohibited transaction. The buying, selling or auctioning (or any attempt at doing so) of characters, character attributes, items, currency, or objects, whether through online auctions (such as ebay), newsgroups, postings on message boards or any other means is prohibited by the EULA and a violation of CCP's proprietary rights in the Game.

Most players did not want to see 24/7 mining operations creating deflation in common goods (using minerals) and inflation in higher priced goods (i.e., rare)! Some took an active role.

Eve Online Farmer Smartbombing

Eve-Online - Farming the farmers *HD*

For what it is worth, had I been allowed to sell my account I am quite confident that I could have sold it for far more than I paid to play. It was a fun game and I played it for a few years.

Stagflationary Mark said...

As a side note, all that mining created an abundance of minerals.

Hoarding minerals from the beginning was generally not something that paid off.

It ultimately created inflation in rare goods though. Money became plentiful (and tended to grow with the increase in mineral production). Rare legendary equipment did not.

I was ahead of that curve while I played. It took pretend money to make pretend money in that game. Those who got pretend money early tended to be able to put it to good use.

I think I am about to cringe. I'm having difficulty distinguishing between reality and illusion. Sigh.