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Virtual Space Station Sells for $330K of Non-Virtual Money

by Amar Toor on January 7, 2010 at 09:00 AM


Lance Bass was once willing to drop a highly publicized $1 million for the chance to fly into outer space. Now, a lesser-known individual has paid a mere $330,000 to own an entire space station... in a make-believe world.

Buzz "Erik" Lightyear is now the deranged lucky owner of the Crystal Palace, a space station on Planet Calypso in the Project Entropia Universe. If you've never heard of the Project Entropia Universe, that's probably because it doesn't exist. It's a virtual platform that launched in 2003, and has since drawn in users by the virtual-spaceship-load. Planet Calypso alone boasts more than 820,000 registered users from 200 countries, and has been making a profit ever since 2004. The volume and scale of the money exchanged in the universe is actually pretty staggering; users swapped a grand total of $420 million in 2008, and several individual transactions well exceeded the $100,000 mark.

It's probably not as much of a joke as it seems at face value. MindArk, the Swedish firm behind Entropia, has actually had its central bank sanctioned by the government of Sweden, so, weird or not, it's become a legitimate market. And truthfully, trading virtual real estate really isn't that radically different from swapping whatever the hell mortgage-backed securities are, right? We just think it would be pretty hard to justify that $300,000 charge on our credit card bill with a nonchalant "fake space station" explanation. [From: GamesBeat]

Tags: crystal palace, CrystalPalace, project entropia universe, ProjectEntropiaUniverse, top, virtual world, VirtualWorld

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