Expensive Virtual Items for Worlds With Few Users: Pricey NFT "Metaverse" Sales Give Me Serious Entropia Universe Déjà Vu

Remember Entropia Universe, a niche MMO launched in 2003 where players can buy and sell in-game items for real cash? You'd only really read about it when there was a breathless report about another record Entropia Universe sale -- like this one, from 2010:

How much would you pay for a string of ones and zeroes? How about a string of ones and zeroes that grossed you $200,000 a year? Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs made history by selling virtual property for a reported total of $635,000. Club Neverdie is a virtual asteroid in the online game Entropia. 

... but despite all that money being spent on virtual items in Entropia, hardly anyone seemed to actually be playing Entropia -- then, or now. (Entropia currently counts less than 100,000 players, according to MMO Populations.)

That very same thing seems to be happening again, with a new NFT/Metaverse spin. For instance, most recently:

A mega yacht just sold for around $650,000, making it the most expensive non-fungible token ever sold in The Sandbox virtual gaming world. The Metaflower Super Mega Yacht was purchased for 149 ether, according to etherscan. It is described as an ultra-luxury megayacht, featuring a DJ booth, two helipads, and a hot tub, among other amenities.

But again, hardly anyone seems to be actually playing The Sandbox:

In 2021, Sandbox's user base has grown five-fold, reaching 500,000 wallets. It also has over 30,000 monthly active users, about half of whom spend more than an hour per day on the metaverse. 

Emphasis mine, because wow. As with both worlds, it's likely that the only people with the most incentive to play in them are those who've paid the most to own items there. And in both cases, the press uncritically reports the high purchase prices without ever asking whether a virtual item is actually valuable if only a vanishingly small number of people believe it to be.

Image source.

Comments

[kdm]

just money laundering

[lkosov]

> people with the most incentive to play in them are those who've paid the most to own items there

...or are looking to make money off others. Of those 30k MAUs, I wonder how many are content creators?

I find it interesting that The Sandbox's smallest land parcel is 96x96 meters, 9216 square meters. Comically large for residential housing, single shops, anything like that. I get the desire to avoid the whole 4x4m ad land thing that SL has, but it seems like they went a bit far in the other direction...

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

We've had our share of highly priced items for a world with few people in SL?. Remember Eshi Otawara's fishhook dress? The OOAK Dominic Shadow made and auctioned for charity? it seems not a year goes by without a charity auction of some really inexplicably priced item somewhere. And I suppose the value of it is whatever the buyer percieves it to be, even if the majority of us disagree or are unaware of it.

[Adeon Writer]

Ask all these NFT gaming “Metaverse” what they have to offer a free to play user, and they will fall silent.

[lkosov]

I tried to check out The Sandbox, for laughs. The signup process is painful and dubious. You can edit your avatar and give them money through the web interface, but the actual game, which looks to be a blocky cartoony Minecraft ripoff, maybe with OSRS influences, requires you to download a Windows app which just repeatedly crashes on my PC (which runs SL happily). Not impressed, not optimistic about its long-term fate.