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Reuters Goes to Second Life
by Chris Remo, Oct 16, 2006 12:45pm PDTIn-game virtual economies have been a subject of growing interest in recent years, with players of massively multiplayer worlds such as Second Life going so far as to hire accountants to manage their virtual accounts. Today, major worldwide news organization Reuters opened a news bureau located within Second Life, dedicated to covering business and entertainment news that develops in the virtual world itself. Reuters has purchased real estate within the game and constructed a Second Life headquarters, including a common area where residents can gather to discuss news and current events. The Reuters/Second Life website contains news, interviews, and even graphs of the current value of a Linden dollar (the game's currency) against the U.S. dollar as well as the amount of economic activity going on within the world. "One thing that Reuters can do is bring its expertise and journalism, especially business and financial journalism, take it into Second Life, and help provide accurate information to the people that are running businesses," explained Reuters Second Life correspondant Adam Pasick. "[They are] making serious decisions, they have to know what's going on in the economy, what's happening with the currency, and so Reuters is, I think, pretty well suited to provide that service." Second Life's most successful businessperson is real estate mogul Anshe Chung, who reportedly earns some several hundred thousand dollars a year from her in-game portfolio. Some seven thousand Second Life businesses have turned a real world profit, and according to Reuters, the game's population and GDP are reported to be growing 20% monthly. Reuters' current top story covers an investigation by the United States Congress into how taxation should be approached in Second Life and other virtual economies. Second Life business owners are already expected to report real world Second Life earnings as income, but a hairier issue is determining how to treat entirely in-game transactions which do not leave the virtual world but do have a real world value. Joint Economic Committee senior economist Dan Miller is currently evaluating the economic situation and hopes to prepare a draft of a report on the issue by the end of the year.
Comments
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I love where my logic takes me to sometimes. I just proved that anyone who doesn't like Second Life is a broke loser ;)
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They want to tax virtual profit before it's realized? As it is, with online stock trading, gambling or anything else you are responsible for reporting the income on your tax returns. The gaming company Second Life needs to report its corporate profits. Is Congress trying to implement some sort of Federal sales tax now?
This is absurd on it's face for a few reasons, the least of which is that Fedreal tax coffers and total dollars collected is at an all time high and have skyrocketed as of late.
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We in the first world are so god damn spoiled that we actually have the luxury to live 2 lives when most people in the world are barely able to hold on to one. The least we could do is take the extra time they would have us spend in this game and instead interact with real people, improve ourselves, or improve the world around us.
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The whole thing seems silly to me but I guess it's harmless. When people like Reuters and the BBC and Duran Duran pull publicity stunts by doing things in the game it makes me think slightly less of them but only slightly.
To me it feels like they're desperately trying to appear hip and with technology when they're doing something that seems the opposite to me.
Maybe it's seen differently by the 400,000 active users of the game, though, so who am I to judge? It doesn't have a big negative impact on my opinions, and I imagine has no impact on most people's opinions, while it is a neat way to advertise to that group of people, who presumably appreciate the effort that is gone to to target them. It's definitely no worse than paying for an advertising slot on The Paris Hilton Shitfest Show or whatever the current load of vacuous TV wank is, so maybe it's even a good thing.
(Maybe the Duran Duran guys just like the game and thought it'd be fun (I don't know but it's possible) but the BBC and Reuters things must be commercial choices.)
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To me it's much like a bar adding terminals for bar games. The purpose of the bar is to go drink with friend or strangers. Then a company comes along and says "hey, maybe we can partner with the bar to make ourselves money by providing these gaming kiosks for other forms of entertainment for patrons". Like the bar, Second Life is an environment which servers a specific purpose, yet at the same time presents opportunities for people to participate in entrepreneurship like people have been doing since the dawn of civilization.
As long as there are people to serve, there is money to be made. WoW and EQ would have similar goings on if it wasn't expressly against the terms of service and there was a means to enable such things.
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and i thought i was hot shit getting a bit over $6000 from selling off my ffxi account...