Eh I’ve got like a 20 page harvard case study I’m going to review at lunch that covers their business plan. Between that and the 20 second clip above I think I’ve got it nailed.
Yes. It is lame as fuck. It’s gaming for nerds who aren’t competitive.
Welp, as far as I can tell, their business appears to be centered around getting people to invest real money with them in exchange for their own “Linden Dollars” that players can use to buy in-game fur-suits and other nasty stuff. The real money is then used to support the company, and, combined with an advantageous exchange rate, to create the illusion that there’s positive economic activity taking place.
A terrible game, populated by terrible people, run by a terrible combination of terrible programmers and annoying socialist bastards.
Dwight: “Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment that doesn’t have things like points or scores or winners and losers. My life was so great that I literally wanted a second one.”
Jim: “Oh, it has losers.”
It’s not nerds. It’s deviants.
Also look up the Second Life Safari on SomethingAwful. There’s some good information there.
Think business model of WoW overlayed on the GUI of The Sims.
The whole thing is moroseness embodied.
If it weren’t for all the bank privacy laws it would break I’d send you a screen shot of a customer’s account I was looking at a couple months ago while troubleshooting a “not sufficient funds” issue.
This chick was spending thousands a month in secondlife.com purchases, to the point where she was getting hit with about 20+ NSF charges a month because of it. Up until seeing 14 pages of $3-$6 purchases at secondlife.com and letting my curiosity get the best of me I’d never even heard of it.
So I would say their business model is praying on sad lonely people. /presentation. 
would it violate bank privacy to post pics of her? 
this is weird and sad
it’s like nyspeed.com x 1231230924801924
Moruiteda pretty much has it spot on, the amount of money people spend on this is ridiculous. What kind of idiot pays money for virtual land in a game. And then spends more money to virtually furnish it.
It’s quite sad.
EDIT: I just remembered my neighbors wife made money playing the game by playing a virtual stripper. I lolled.
I think its screwed up what these people do and don’t know why. But on a business side, they found a perfect market to make money. Good for them!
This is excellent. You guys are clarifying what I read in the case study. The case study made it sound like big businesses were buying islands to hold private meetings without paying for travel costs and all sorts of legit things that I’ve been on the internet too long to believe.
Moriutelda, you sound bitter. Were you one of the people I read about that got your avatar locked in a bird cage by a hacker?
It may be stupid, but that company is doing something right. My stepdad works for Xerox and was explaining how the advertising group spent 1.2 mil on a program called Second Life and he had no clue on what it was. Once I explained it he was floored by some of the stats he pulled up and how obsessed people get.
Honestly, it could happen. There are quite a few people that run businesses on there and such and do make some money.
It’s literally a second life in a parallel universe. There are e-personas, e-land, e-business, and even an e-conomy. :lol:
e-cocks?
The case study even mentioned that X percent of people pretend to be the opposite sex. :ohnoes:
how do you think JEG is making money these days? Besides getting it from you? His Second Life persona resembles Ann Coulter with worse grammar.
No, I wasted about 30 minutes of my life on this game (including download time) before I decided it was the most retarded thing I’ve ever played in my life.
I’m also very active on SomethingAwful and am highly amused by the Second Life Safari. They’re the hackers that made bouncing, multiplying balls that crashed the SL server a few times, destroyed a CNet interview with Anshe Chung by pelting them with a rain of genitals, and celebrated the release of the movie 300 by running around like a bunch of menaces in crudely crafted Spartans.
lol… magic 8 ball says go directly to jail.