Can you really make money on it? Seems like the next doge coin or something but I’m not sure.
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It’s just assets in a video game. Their value is just about purely speculative on the fact there will be demand for them in the future
Someone has a vision of a virtual area, city, country or world. A virtual reality or metaverse. They put in money and time to lay it out and implement it. It’s not for fun, however…That someone has a plan of generating interest for that virtual environment and pushes its adoptions for whatever use case they dream of. After all, it’s to make them money. They figure that a possible source of income would be to sell proof of ownership of parcels in that virtual environment.
If it really catches on, yes, one could make money. If people don’t show interest in it, or if the proposed use cases turn out to be impractical, you’ll sit on a worthless digital certificate that no-one is going to buy from you.
It means someone made a video game, and in that game land can belong to a player. For example, imagine an RPG that has real neighborhoods in towns. It might choose to sell plots to players who can then build a house or a shop or something on that spot. Then the town is *actually* populated by people. It’s a pretty neat idea. It’s not a new idea. I’m pretty sure Ultima Online sold houses to players back in the 90s.
“Can you make money on it?” is the same as any other piece of virtual “property”: if you can find someone who will pay you more than you paid to get it, you can make money. It’s happened in some games. I think maybe Final Fantasy XIV? In the game I’m thinking, the developer underestimated how popular player houses would be and didn’t make nearly enough room for it in-game. So they sold out very quickly. Then people wanted it, but couldn’t get it, so they started offering the people who had it more money than what those people paid.
In theory, it shouldn’t work that way. In real-life, real estate works as a good investment because land, particularly in certain locations, is finite. You can’t make more land in the middle of San Francisco. All of the land for sale is sold, so you have to buy it from someone else. But in a video game, land is *technically* infinite. It’s only scarce if, for whatever reason, the developer chooses to limit how much is for sale. (There’s a few technical reasons why they may limit it, but those problems are easier to solve than real-world land problems.)
So for a virtual land market to be as lucrative as a real-world land market, there has to be some expectation that the developer will either never sell more or will be slow to sell it. It also has to be in a game people actually care to own property in. Some of the promise of current virtual land schemes is the land will be sold by NFT so “it can work in other games”. Yeah. Good luck talking Nintendo into doing the work so your Surprised Giraffe Apartment House can appear in a Mario Kart stage, or finding a way to make From Software put it in Eldin Ring.
I’m assuming you also saw the article today about the person who purchased land in Entropia.
In that case, and in some other specific cases (like Second Life) the developers/owners of the game actually sell in game land for real money, but typically also allow plays to cash out their in game currency for real money.
In the case of entropia the land will allow the owner to generate an income in game because they tax the usage of the land and gain a small, but automatic percent of any in game currency generated through the use of the land. The owner of the land can then cash out the currency for real money.
In the case of Second Life, not only was there a thriving real estate market, but players would pay rent on real estate to run a store where they could sell game assets they had made, such as skins, models, or animations. Pretty sure there’s some famous cases of players also running brothels in game and being able to make a real living off that as well.
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