Entrepreneur Makes Millions Selling Virtual Land 142
kkleiner writes "How much would you pay for a piece of imaginary real estate? Anshe Chung has made millions renting it. Today, Anshe Chung Studios has 80+ employees managing thousands of rental properties, helping design new 3D virtual chat rooms, and making tons of money on virtual to real currency exchanges. Anshe was the first person whose virtual property exceeded a real world value of 1 million dollars, and Anshe Chung Studios is perhaps the single largest third party developer of virtual property ever."
Call now and SAVE on Virtually Nothing! (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey look, these are your VERY OWN 1's and 0's! We are taking painstaking measures to make sure that absolutely NOBODY ELSE has this same arrangement of 1's and 0's. Sure, we could randomly generate them and then check them by md5 sum against all other files in our database, but NO, we design them JUST FOR YOU!
Hurry now and we'll throw in not just one set of 1's and 0's, but we'll sell it at HALF PRICE! That's right call now and only pay $1999.99, that's 50% off the normal price of 3999.98!
But wait, there's MORE.
Call within the next TEN MINUTES and we'll give you not just one set of 1's and 0's, but TWO sets for the same price! That's only 999.995 EACH! Yes, that's 75% off each set of 1's and 0's!
They are virtually PRICELESS!
I'm conflicted (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never been into Second Life, or World of Warcraft, or any of those online games that've been known for people using real money to buy pretend stuff in the game - but, on an individual level, it's never bothered me. I figure it's those folk's money, so they can spend it however they want... just like I might buy a decent bottle of Scotch.
But somehow, in the aggregate, this bothers me. I can't really put my finger on why, exactly; but it just seems like a sign our society is going down the toilet (or something equally dire). It's probably just because I'm older than most of these people, I suppose.