Tag: Project Entropia

I have long been skeptical of MMORPG Project Entropia so when news reports surfaced that someone had paid $100,000 for an in-game piece of virtual property, I was a bit skeptical. Now it turns out that, in fact, the entire story is apparently another likely PE fabrication.

That investor who spent $100,000 for an virtual Space Station? He’s Jon Jacobs who just coincidentally happens to have recently been employed as the U.S. spokesman for Project Entropia! His official PE biography from a September 2004 conference reads,

Jon Jacobs, U.S. Spokesperson, Project Entropia: Jon Jacobs is the writer and producer of the hit song played in the Project Entropia Universe. It hit #3 on the Video Game Charts on www.ifilm.com beating out Blood Rayne 2 and even Spiderman 2 for a day. JonÂ’s main title within the company is US Spokesperson. His functions include US strategic relations as well as, business development, marketing and content acquisition.

That auction that yielded a staggering $100,000 sale price for the virtual space station? It apparently ended while the PE servers were offline.

Note, too, that all of the stories about this in the mainstream media are incorrect. The virtual station did not sell for $100,000. Rather it sold in-game for 1 million Project Entropia dollars which, in theory, would be exchangable for $100,000. If you think Jacobs actually put up $100,000 of his own money solely for this piece of property, I’ve got a bridge in Azeroth for sale . . .

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.

The MMORPG Project Entropia will begin taking applications for beta testers beginning March 1. I mention this primarily to clarify something I wrote many months ago questioning the legitimacy of the game.

Specifically, the game has a pseudo-banking functions which lets you exchange real money online with other players in an interesting attempt to create a market-like system within the game. I was originally very skeptical about the game given the numerous regulations on money transfers.

Anyway, it turns out my skepticism was unwarranted and that this and similar online pseudo-banking schemes are at the moment not covered by banking regulations within the United States. PayPal, for example, also falls outside of the U.S. banking regulatory structure.

This state of affairs is unlikely to last long, however, as agencies which are used to spying on bank transactions are already lobbying to bring these new economic experiments under the same umbrella of regulations, but for the moment they’re completely legal and relatively regulation free.

Project Entropia is billed as an on-line persistent 3D game, but this excerpt from a recent press release really makes me skeptical:

MindArk said the second universe, Project Entropia, will be governed by an extensive set of rules familiar to on-line gamers and role game players which will govern actions and possibilities. The economy system of Project Entropia is unique and subject to patent application. The cash to be handled in Project Entropia is real and convertible to any major currency of the real world. As MindArk has solved the issue of handling money in the virtual world and to transfer money from the virtual to the real world, they are able to offer access to the new universe at no cost.

I am not saying it is a scam, but the above paragraph makes no sense. If they are really going online with a system that makes it trivial to transfer money from the virtual world to the real world, and they are going to launch worldwide as they have been promising, then they are going to get shut down almost immediately by laws designed to prevent money laundering.

Plus, leaving aside the money laundering issue for a second, even using computers to handle the detailed work, there are still real costs associated with processing and keeping track of monetary transfers, especially when you start getting into fluctuating currencies. How this adds up to making the service free makes no sense.

On the other hand, if they have really found a way to make it impossible for governments to enforce laws against money laundering, more power to them — just tell me where to sign up. Somehow, though, I would bet they are either vastly overselling the capabilities of the system or the amount of money that can be transferred in and out of the virtual world is very limited or it is a scam of some sort.

Until they prove their system is superior, E-Bay and other online auction facilities are still the only way to go for all your money laundering needs (disclaimer: I do not make enough money to bother laundering it, but the Internet already makes money laundering far easier than it ever has been).

Taking its moniker seriously, I suspect the energy behind Project Entropia will quickly degrade and the ability of the game or virtual world to accomplish meaningful work will quickly disappear.