I actually agree with almost everything you said. What I said was flip, to be sure, but I didn't intend for it to be forward looking at all. Obviously virtual goods can and do get bought and sold, and I have no problem believing that someday what I said could be precisely wrong in that someone would pay $500k for a fucking virtual space station made out of pixels stored on an Oracle RAC.
I was posting to shine a light on the fact that this company has pulled this kind of thing before, reporting huge dollar transactions that were either provably made up or at least had no way of verifying them. And that the person involved in this report is an employee of the company that sells these virtual goods (but they never, ever mention that). All that info came via researching the claims and not judgements about the value of virtual goods.
I was just trying to give an extra way of evaluating what I was saying. I claimed they're liars, linked to some supporting discussion of that, but it's the Internet - how do you know it's not me that's lying and them that's telling the truth? There a gut check is useful - it's pretty easy to tell that _today_ in 2010 people aren't dropping $500k on virtual real estate in a poorly funded and poorly known (compared to say second life, eve, warcraft, etc) virtual world. At least it's unlikely enough that you should demand a fair amount of proof before you believe it (and you won't be able to find any except for the pr-news-blog circle jerk)
I hope that explains what I meant better. No question that there are many people exchanging real money for virtual property in game type virtual environments.
I was posting to shine a light on the fact that this company has pulled this kind of thing before, reporting huge dollar transactions that were either provably made up or at least had no way of verifying them. And that the person involved in this report is an employee of the company that sells these virtual goods (but they never, ever mention that). All that info came via researching the claims and not judgements about the value of virtual goods.
I was just trying to give an extra way of evaluating what I was saying. I claimed they're liars, linked to some supporting discussion of that, but it's the Internet - how do you know it's not me that's lying and them that's telling the truth? There a gut check is useful - it's pretty easy to tell that _today_ in 2010 people aren't dropping $500k on virtual real estate in a poorly funded and poorly known (compared to say second life, eve, warcraft, etc) virtual world. At least it's unlikely enough that you should demand a fair amount of proof before you believe it (and you won't be able to find any except for the pr-news-blog circle jerk)
I hope that explains what I meant better. No question that there are many people exchanging real money for virtual property in game type virtual environments.