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eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jan 30, 2007 09:07 AM
from the selective-process dept.
from the selective-process dept.
As a follow-up to last week's eBay delisting story, CNET has the word that Second Life content is exempt from this decision. Mr. Durzy, speaking with CNET, specifically cited Second Life content as exempt because of the uncertain role of the virtual world. As the company (and the rest of us) are uncertain whether to label Second Life as a game in the first place, player-created content is still sellable via eBay auction. A perfectly fine explanation, but GigaGamez takes things a step further, pointing out that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar became a major investor in Linden Labs in 2004. It's uncertain if this constitutes a conflict of interest, because confusion about what exactly Second Life is persists pretty much everywhere. Just the same, it's interesting to note. Their article on the subject also has a few words of commentary from Edward Castronova, the well-known commentator on all things RMT.
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eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
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It's not a game.... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.lordfly.com/music.html | Last Journal: Friday July 05 2002, @09:54PM)
In all seriousness, I'm kinda glad they skipped SL. Yes, it's a program where many, many (many) people derive a ton of entertainment from, but it's also being used by an increasing amount of huge companies to do business and advertise their products. So it's not so much of a game as it's a platform, I guess.
Kinda like how some people derive tons of pleasure from compiling C++ programs. Doesn't make it a game to be placed next to Doom and WoW...
Disclaimer: I make a living designing spaces for those companies, so sure, I'm a smidge biased.
Re:It's not a game.... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://egypt.urnash.com/)
Re:It's not a game.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, just make it stop.
The Big Difference... (Score:5, Insightful)
Second Life encourages the sale of ingame assets and the secondary market that has sprung up around it.
If Blizzard said it was OK to sell the Sword of a Thousand Truths on ebay for real cash dollars, I'm sure Ebay would allow it to be sold.
Re:The Big Difference... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.vanderlee.com/)
As for a description of Second Life; I think it's more of an operating system then anything else. A very limited and specialized OS perhaps, but in essence it provides the same basic functions. Technically, Second Life is probably closer to a game engine than an actual game.
Pretty Simple (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday May 30 2006, @08:29PM)
loophole? (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.drbenny.org/)
whos going to stop people from doing the same thing through second life?
Why? Pierre, of course. (Score:2, Interesting)
Linden Labs is funded by Pierre Omidyar.
Many years ago, Pierre Omidyar founded Ebay.
RMT?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so after searching Google for acronyms matching RMT, I worked out that in this context it means "Real Money Transfer" or "Real Money Trading", but seriously... and I normally can't stand posts that bitch about the editors... but seriously... and I'm usually happy to look up any acronym that I SHOULD know about, unless it is really FUCKING obscure... but SERIOUSLY... WOULD IT FUCKING TAKE YOU SLASHDOT EDITORS TWO SECONDS TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK RMT MEANS?!?!?
Just a policy? (Score:2)
This is business (Score:2, Interesting)
It IS a conflict of interest! (Score:1)
In a word: (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Boring.
Now that we've cleared that up...
Its got nothing to do with "uncertain status". (Score:2)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
It's not against the TOS for Second Life.
Therefore eBay has no grounds for action against trading SL goods on eBay.
where's the conflict? (Score:2)
This is no more of a "conflict of interest" than when your cafeteria decides to serve only Coca Cola company products. It may suck, but until they are a near-monopoly, they can favor each other in whatever way they want.