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Someone brought up this link in another forum ...
http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy.php

... then as I was looking into it, there is a mention of:

Millions of Linden Dollars change hands every month for the goods and services Residents create and provide. This currency may then be bought and sold on LindeX (Second Life's official currency exchange), or other unaffiliated third party sites for real currency.

Real currency ? ... it is possible to make money out of this ?

Does anyone have first hand experiences to share ?

I've heard stories of people playing this game and making some pretty decent side cash by selling stuff "not sure what you sell, but you get the point"

I looked into it a while ago. Some people make some serious coin. There's a company in China who owns a ton of virtual real estate and employs 15 people who just build virtual buildings to sell. Apparently the owner is making six figures a year of just second life. I also read about a guy who wrote scripts to do stupid things like make the characters in the virtual world hug, sells them for a dollar, but he sells like 300 of them a day. You can make linden dollars all kinds of ways...

Do they also have Goodfellas?

I had also read about another game like this (can't remember which) where there were literally computer geek sweat-shops in Mexico where these kids played all day earning "coin" that the owners would turn around and sell to rich kids in the US so they could buy their castles, armies or whatever.....

Yep, the first virtual millionaire was made near the end of last year. A woman who models buildings and clothes, which people buy through the game. She made $1million after converting her Linden dollars.

I've been meaning to look in to it more.

Tim.

Might be good for an otherwise unemployed modeler. I played with it about a year ago. It's not a game at all, more of a 3D chat app combined with a virtual world you can roam around in. I found it incredibly boring and quit. It has a pretty powerful scripting system and 3D modeler, and people make their money (which can be officially converted to real money) by selling scripts and 3D objects (houses, clothing, etc). I don't think you can import external models though, you have to use their creator.

Believe it or not, there are also people making money as "prostitutes" in SL- that's probably a more profitable activity than 3D modeling.

What some of you are talking about sounds like World of Warcraft (which is more of a proper game), where there are people employed in China just building up characters, or "gold farming." Those assets are then sold on Ebay, which is not an officially sanctioned transaction.

Very interesting !

Do you have to pay membership to do all that ?
I see they have a free "Basic membership" ... but is it a crippled version ?

Cool link... first time for me hearing of such a thing.. I think it might be interesting for market research and such.

Thomas,
I just created a basic account, to have a look, it is free

You only have to start paying if you want to buy "land" I think. And you only need land if you want to keep the objects you create. Otherwise the free account lets you do anything you could do otherwise, and you get a few bucks spending money too. It's good for giving you an idea of how dreadfully boring the whole exercise is.

Yes, I've been reading about this for a while. There was also a similiar world called 'there' (I think it's there.com)

I think some companies like blizzard are trying to fight against the chinese sweatshops by changing game mechanics...

I think I first read about virtual real estate in the ultima online world - where someone had a medieval keep for sale for about 350$.

But this is the best eg. I stumbled across a usenet message of a guy offering cash to fellow ultima players to meet him a certain spot in the game at a certain time to help him hunt down and ambush another player who had broken into his castle and stolen some 'virtual' object. Mercenaries!