Back in September 2000, I posted an article wondering if the proposed online game Project Entropia was, in fact, just a scam.
And what do you know — Project Entropia now has potential serious legal problems including a raid by Swedish authorities who found game’s maker, Mind Ark, using hundreds of pirated software titles and at least one player who is convinced that the game is a scam.
The reason I was suspicious of Project Entropia was because it promised to allow players to make real money transactions in the game. Rather than using fake gold coins or some other pseudo-currency, characters in Project Entropia would use real money. I noted at the time that I thought this would run afoul of all sorts of money laundring problems.
I did back away from that early last year conceding that it might be able to survive in the same legal grey area that PayPal has. But details in a Wired story about the raid suggest that even if it’s not a scam, it’s not very careful with its players money. Exhibit A,
MindArk stoked these dreams by promising that a “dollar millionaire” would emerge from Entropia within a year of the game’s release.
But enthusiasm for the game has been hobbled, as a series of bugs wiped out some players’ inventories and deleted others’ long-assembled characters entirely. That’s a big deal in any game but an outright disaster in Entropia, where those hoards are paid for with actual cash.
“It seems more like a scam than anything,” Entropia player Joao Coelho wrote in an e-mail.
Another player, whose account mysteriously disappeared, added in a post to the Entropia message boards, “I’m going to be calling my credit card company to get my stolen money back.”
Scam or not, I doubt Mind Ark can pull off all of the things that would be needed to make a game like this succeed. There are just too many obstacles to overcome.
Source:
Pirate Cops Raid MS Gaming Foe. Noah Shachtman, Wired, June 28, 2002.