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Coldwell Banker To Sell Second Life Properties
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 24, 2007 11:59 PM
from the piece-of-the-rock dept.
from the piece-of-the-rock dept.
Dekortage sends news of what may be a new development in the attempted mainstreaming of Second Life. We've seen plenty of examples of real-world news media, politicos, and PR campaigns setting up in SL. But so far most of this action has been about first-life organizations trying to gain real-world publicity by their forays into SL. CNN is reporting that the real estate firm Coldwell Banker is moving into SL for the purpose of selling and renting in-world properties. From the article: "Coldwell Banker has bought extensive tracts of property on the central 'mainland' of Second Life. (Most companies own 'islands' scattered all over.) It subdivided this digital land into 520 individual houses and living units, half of which it will sell and half it will rent... 'A small number of land barons mostly control real estate in Second Life, and we thought we could bring real estate to the masses,' [a VP explained]."
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Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
What is to keep Linden from increasing the amount of land? ( They did it back in 2003, IIRC ) Not only would this give them more space for more players, but it decreases the power of land barons. And having a 'new world' to explore would add more interest to the game. Anyone want to be Magellan? Or Columbus? There seems to be no downside for Linden to increase the ammount of land.
There definitely is a downside to NOT increasing the ammount of land: competition. If SL gets too crowded, that just helps up-and-coming competitors.
As supply increases, price decreases. There is not even the real-world parallel of "location, location, and location" to uphold property value in Second Life because of teleportation.
I predict that Coldwell Banker will lose their shirts on this one.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, not quite true: it helps to have e.g. a lot of merchants together in one place, as it's a pain to teleport 30 times to look at everyone's goods. So new merchants are going to want to be where the merchants already are. Although I agree you can't use the whole "They ain't makin' any more land" line here, as LL certainly can do that.
Still, I have to ask, WTF? Don't people play SL to get away from assholes who add no value but take your money
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe, but they're only virtual shirts, and they can just rez others.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Funny)
It's like when a company sells more shares, and all those idiot investors lose their shirts. You should probably get on the phone and tell Coldwell why they are idiots, and how if you were in charge you could save the company. They'll probably hire you on the spot.
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. This is what happened with domain names. They went sky high, then lots of businesses crashed and they increased the number of TLDs, so people who had invested in the land grab didn't always win.
The other thing is that any theory of scarcity presupposes that Linden will be the only, or at least the winning, item in this area. If someone came along and offered an alternate space, it wouldn't even matter if Linden had put a guarantee in writing... the value could still drop due to ordinary competition. No one has guaranteed Linden a monopoly.
Cyberspace is big... There's really no reason for there to be a scarcity of real estate. It isn't, after all, real estate. It's contrived. And if the prices go too high, that simple fact should invite competition. A key defining characteristic of real estate is supposed to be that they're not making more of it.
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There's also the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Well games, that's not the case. The player base can leave. UO and EQ are two examples of that happening. Once both were major players, and were able to claim more people playing them than any MMORPG before. Both now have dwindled to be minor player
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Re:WTF is the point of this game? (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading countless articles about this wonderful new world of second life, I decided to check it out. What a piece of bloated crap-ware. I don't think the idea behind second life is worthless, but it's current incarnation is a joke.
I don't have a PS3, and have no plans currently to purchase one, but I think their new "Home" has a better chance of becoming popular than second life ever will.
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I wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
Blurring the line between real and virtual (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the worst kind of speculation we can have, worse than speculating on the stock or commodity market. If you buy a bunch of stocks on a company, and if the market crashes, you still own bits of that company, and the company may be just doing well, making a profit every year. If you buy the so-called lands in SL, and if SL were to die, what are you left up with?
I think this is where gamings are dangerous. And this is an area where I support legislative control. We already have regulations on stock markets, on currency trading, on casino, on auction, on the general trading, etc, we might as well have regulations on the worst kind of speculation: speculation on nothing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A smart investor will not put his money in something that has the risk of becoming valueless. Evidently, Linden has made many people
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only problem there is that real physical property always has some level of intrinsic value simply because it physically exists. Sure, it might not have any people living near it, and it may be somehow polluted or wrecked by natural disaster, but there is always intrinsic value in matter because it is, well, matter.
This
Re:Blurring the line between real and virtual (Score:5, Interesting)
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The real question is . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
This made me check my calendar. (Score:4, Funny)
Do any of you actually use Second Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason I ask is because so many companies seem to be on the bandwagon of this thing, but my friends are almost uniformly tech savvy early adopters and I don't know anybody who's ever logged into it other than to check it out and laugh at it. I've got nothing against it, and if anybody uses it I'm not going to laugh at you or anything. I may not see the appeal, but I don't see the appeal of a lot of things the average person likes. I just haven't seen anybody else who really likes it either, and that's made me question its popularity other than as a kind of inside joke.
I do think it's a great concept, and I'm sure true virtual worlds will be all the rage someday. I'm just suspicious that anybody actually sees this as a good enough implementation to really start spending time there. I've heard the furry community has taken up residence there to some extent, but honestly when I log in I hardly see any concentration of people anywhere, furry or not.
Re:Do any of you actually use Second Life? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Do any of you actually use Second Life? (Score:5, Interesting)
However SL isn't really a WoW competitor. It's more like IRC in 3D - think of it as a chatroom where you can actually do things with the other people there. And of course virtually *everything* in SL has been constructed by the people in it. True the building tools have limitations and there's vast amounts of crap. but equally there's some very imagenative stuff too. The scripting language is by no means a toy too, even though that has some major flaws.
It's also an interesting question who does play it. I see several groups
1. Newbies. Vast numbers of people sign on, hang around the public welcome areas briefly, do a little touring then never play it again. It's quite common to see later reactions from them on
2. Wankers. Literally. A friend of mine who owns a SL club believes 50% of signups do nothing else but cybersex fot the first month. I think she's proberbly right.
3. Designers, Builders, Coders. Although the tools are limited with imagination there's a lot that can be done. SL seems quite a common outlet for amateur designers, coders and 3D artists. It may not be cutting edge, but you tend to get a lot of attention and feedback. If you're a professional coder then SL is well worth a look as it does have potential and some of the Lindons actually hold open office hours so you can talk to the game designers directly if you wish.
4. Roleplayers. There's large communities of roleplayers - most of whom spend 90% of their time in roleplay sims so will never be encountered by newbies. A quite common scenario is for a group to jointly buy a server, construct an enviroment, then play in that. Sort of like design your own game and play it using SL simply as an environment to do that. Roleplay covers a wide range from extreme characterization to mild 'wouldn't it be nice to live in environment X' types. Tends to be very hardcore players who spend a lot of time in SL.
5. Social players. Similar to roleplayers in that they have a community of friends but without the roleplay angle. Again these people hardly ever go near the common meeting places so a newbie will never pick up on them. A large part of the 'core' SL players are in this group.
6. Others - musicians, speculators, educators etc etc
People can belong to more than one group of course. Myself I am uncertain about the future of SL. Against it it has
a. Relatively poor graphics
b. Architecture limitations - the *bloody* asset server is a major pain point. It's not clear how far it can scale. The 50 avs in a sim limit is laughable for example.
c. It has a certain reputation in some influential quarters
d. The Lindons appear to be a bunch of bloody hippies
But for
a. Because the world is user constructed and designed to be at a fundemental level - and not given, as in WoW or other games, then in theory it can evolve. Games with Everquest, WoW, Eve etc cannot move forward in the same way.
b. It is one world and not sharded
c. It does provide enough tools that there is room for professional level interest in it.
d. It's totally generic
e. It has an established user base of people with graphic, building and coding skills who can jointly take it forward as the tools and capabilities improve. Real first mover advantage that.
On balance I think it likely to be here to stay and evolve as the prime metaverse. However I expect it to be the first among many (possibly with interconnections) and remain a minority interest for many years yet. It is worth your time though to look at it on a deeper level than simply 'ooh the graphics are crap' or 'it's just full of wankers'.
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Is SL wants it real, then.. lets give them real.. (Score:3, Funny)
Virtual Goods and Virtual Property (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's step back a bit here... What is the difference between "software" and "a virtual shirt", or "digital music"? Are they not both just some pattern of ones and zeros? Sure, a virtual shirt only makes sense in terms of Second Life... But for me this is the same as buying digital music that can be played on some hardware device. Or buying software that can be run on some subset of computers.
Virtual land... Who would rent "virtual property"? What sense does that make? Perhaps we should ask all those that rent space for web pages?
That being said, I think Second Life is kinda daft in its implementation, but the concept is very very cool.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
When you die in New Jersey, you die in real life !
Re:Whoa Cowboy! (Score:5, Funny)
Some VR game with, apparently, the BEST PRESS AGENT EVAR!
Seriously, they're in the news every damned day with stories like this. And yet the only people who actually play Second Life are furry pedophile rapists. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but that's the reputation the game has. How the hell do they get all this press? Sexual favors?
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