$90 a minute
Red Herring has an article on Weblo, an example of crossover between real world data and virtual worlds. There’s also a CNet article. It appears to basically be a money speculation game, using real world data as inputs: mostly geography, in the examples, but also things like celebrity likenesses, domain names, and so on. Among the tidbits in the article are that it’s pulling in $90 a minute. Impressive, if so.
Critically, you can cash out from the speculation. Another data point for the interesting question of what exactly makes something gambling — after all, market speculation, could easily fall under the definition. There also seem to be interesting nesting elements — the example is given of someone who owns “Ohio” and someone else who owns a city within Ohio, and the owner of Ohio gets a fraction of the earnings of the city.
Part of playing the game is engaging in promotion of the “brand” that you purchased. If it’s a celebrity, you make a fansite within the Weblo context, and try to drive traffic to it. If it’s a city, you get to do things like set taxes and so on. You can work your way up even to President of a country. The goal is to add value to this arbitrary label, and then resell in order to make money.
As of right now, looks like the winning auctions of real estate seem to go for $12-20 mostly.
7 Responses to “$90 a minute”
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Sounds like a giant pyramid scheme. I can’t believe people actually put money into stuff like this.
Then again, if buying islands in Entropia makes any kind of sense, maybe this does too… somehow?
As of 7:15 p.m. PST 10/7/06 Weblo is “closed for maintenace” I’monderfing what’s happening — of course, I’m also wondering what’s happening with the cities and the airports I just bought are doing too…thereis no realtime help on Weblo…well, at least I got a couple of good blogs about it? js
The money spinning game is happening again.
The value of something is the amount someone else is willing to pay for. This is just taking this idea to the next level.
It’s pump and dump except without the securities law restrictions and penalities.
It’s both exciting and worrisome.
Frank
Virtual “speculation”. Is this gambling in the legal sense? I think so, but more importantly is the question of whether any one of the federal or state governments can make a case against internet games as gambling.
This whole thing is going to someday get pretty messy. But the guys who end up stuck on a stick in the legal manuevers are also going to end up very rich (after penalties and taxes) due to the publicity.
[…] Weblo – Skill Game or Scam? Raph Koster had an blog entry about a new “game” – Weblo. This game seems to be a virtual real estate type game, but the problem is that the rules are not terribly clear. The game is a world within our world with an Internet within the Internet. Basically, you can buy and sell cities, states, “properties”, domain names, and celebrities. I went wandering around the site (without registering) to get a sense of the system. They don’t really rationally control real estate. There is a “Taj Mahal” and a “The Taj Mahal”. A “Peking” but not a “Beijing”. This seems to limit the value of any given asset as it may be ambiguous. Most of the action when I logged in was focused on domain names. For some reason, I couldn’t buy “hell.com”, but I could buy “hell.net” and “hell.org”. The game seems to let players submit geography locations to get them added to the world. Whether this is laziness or flexibility is subject for some debate. I kind of wanted to buy Antartica, the North and South Poles, and a bunch of mythical locations – why not? Can’t I own Middle Earth and Atlantis or Lemuria or Valhalla? How about the Moon or Area 51? (If you buy these and make money, remember me kindly ). There are two ways to make money: buying and selling virtual assets and getting a cut of the ad-revenue from the “mini-site pages” within Weblo’s own “Internet”. Most of the money to be made is from buying and selling the virtual assets as opposed to any “ad revenue”… where you get a percent of a percent, based on your membership level. Since the company does not seem to really have a complete list of properties, the game seems vulnerable to being “messed with” and thus limit the potential for revenues from trading game assets. Raph asked about gambling… I don’t see that as the problem, but perhaps more of an issue of creating questionable securities (the “deeds” for the virtual assets). Red Herring lives up to its name by having an article on this strangeness as does CNet. Oh, of course these guys got a $2.5 Million in funding… my respect for the VC industry knows no bounds. Posted by SecurePlay in Game Design, Gambling, Skill Games at 10:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog Trackbacks Trackback specific URI for this entry No Trackbacks Comments Display comments as (Linear | Threaded) No comments Add Comment […]
[…] Weblo – Skill Game or Scam? Raph Koster had an blog entry about a new “game” – Weblo. This game seems to be a virtual real estate type game, but the problem is that the rules are not terribly clear. The game is a world within our world with an Internet within the Internet. Basically, you can buy and sell cities, states, “properties”, domain names, and celebrities. I went wandering around the site (without registering) to get a sense of the system. They don’t really rationally control real estate. There is a “Taj Mahal” and a “The Taj Mahal”. A “Peking” but not a “Beijing”. This seems to limit the value of any given asset as it may be ambiguous. Most of the action when I logged in was focused on domain names. For some reason, I couldn’t buy “hell.com”, but I could buy “hell.net” and “hell.org”. The game seems to let players submit geography locations to get them added to the world. Whether this is laziness or flexibility is subject for some debate. I kind of wanted to buy Antartica, the North and South Poles, and a bunch of mythical locations – why not? Can’t I own Middle Earth and Atlantis or Lemuria or Valhalla? How about the Moon or Area 51? (If you buy these and make money, remember me kindly ). There are two ways to make money: buying and selling virtual assets and getting a cut of the ad-revenue from the “mini-site pages” within Weblo’s own “Internet”. Most of the money to be made is from buying and selling the virtual assets as opposed to any “ad revenue”… where you get a percent of a percent, based on your membership level. Since the company does not seem to really have a complete list of properties, the game seems vulnerable to being “messed with” and thus limit the potential for revenues from trading game assets. Raph asked about gambling… I don’t see that as the problem, but perhaps more of an issue of creating questionable securities (the “deeds” for the virtual assets). Red Herring lives up to its name by having an article on this strangeness as does CNet. Oh, of course these guys got a $2.5 Million in funding… my respect for the VC industry knows no bounds. Posted by SecurePlay at 10:17 | Comment (1) (Page 1 of 1, totalling 1 entries) View as PDF: This month | Full blog […]
This is just a pyramid scheme with the thinnest reed of a product backing it: advertising revenues from the site. The prices probably *started* higher than the advertising revenues will ever warrant (considering most of them seem to be “0”, and will likely remain there for all time), and they will continue getting traded up until buyers cannot be found, at which point the last guy with the “property” is left with a pitiful income stream and no way to sell it.
Its like Project Entropia, which is essentially a giant slot machine which wears a fig-leaf to skirt laws governing actual slot machines.