MMOGs developers are having to make increasingly extraordinary moves to grab the attentions of headline-writers these days, what with Real Money Transfers (RMTs) for virtual castles a seemingly everyday occurrence (which, in fact, they are). Some have used the sexy approach, others have used the market share approach and still others have used the controversy approach.
Project Entropia has relied upon the "Say what?!" approach to grab column inches. Their announcements since 2004 have regularly and dramatically blurred the boundary between real and virtual money. They first became the subject of mainstream attention when it was announced that the sale of a virtual island in the online world went for over US$26,000. They repeated the feat the next year. Now their well-oiled press machine has gone into overdrive, with the announcement that users of the world can now withdraw cash from real-world ATM machines from stores of game-cash from in-world balances.
Wowee - pulling virtual world cash out of my bank machine means I'll be raiding like a loon from now on! I'll never use my overdraft again!
The reality is, I'll be ducking Entropia's press releases from now on thanks to Dan Hunter at Terra Nova who blows this latest scheme out of the water faster than Stefan Eriksson can drive his Ferrari off the Pacific Coast Highway.
First off, it's genuinely no big deal to have a "Project Entropia Card", since almost any bank is happy to give you a card with your brand on it. At various times I've had credit cards with brands like "United Airlines", "University of Pennsylvania" and "National Geographic" on them, even though I'm confident that none of those institutions is actually a bank. This is called "co-branding" and it's extremely common. Then there is the amazing fact that you can use your "virtual" currency in the real world. But think about what this actually means: you pay US dollars (or whatever currency you use) to get PEDs at the rate of 10 PEDs per US dollar; these PEDs sit in an account that Mindark controls; and if you get a Project Entropia card you can extract the PEDs from your account as dollars. Which is another way of saying that you put dollars in, and you can get dollars out. Hey, guess what? This new frontier in virtual currency is...wait for it...a co-branded debit card.
As Hunter argues, it's not the first time Entropia's people have presented a rather flimsy - but expertly worded - press release to the world's media. Indeed, he highlights the example of the $100K space station sold to John "Neverdie" Jacobs:
Jacobs, various news sources reported, was an independent filmmaker and DJ who intended to run the station as a virtual nightclub and resort. What no news services (to the best of my knowledge) ever reported is that Jon "Neverdie" Jacobs worked for MindArk as their "Project Entropia, US Spokesman." He was a speaker at the Digital Hollywood conference in 2004 on internet gaming, and his (presumably self-written) biography says that his responsibilities for Project Entropia include "business development, marketing and content acquisition"... So it turns out that the "sale" of Space Station "Neverdie" was from MindArk to, um, one of their marketing and PR people.
Once burned, twice shy.
via Joystiq and Terra Nova
