2nd Life, The Sims and World of Warcraft

Ever dreamed of a second oportunity??!?? Here is your chance! Start your life over again, and do it better! The way you always wanted it. And the best thing is: Get a new own (virtual) identity!
The Sims, World of Warcraft and 2nd Life are just some of the phenomenons of our time. People can create their own Avatar (digital representation of a real person like your foto in MSN Messenger) and wander around in their favourite virtual world. Do everything they can’t do in real life. And the best thing: anonimously.

Take the fat kid with spots all over his face making a 3D digital representation of himself in the form of Brat Pitt and like this he can get all the virtual girls! Better than spending all the money and energy to plastic surgery and doing sports and diets.

Creators of these games and virtual worlds (2nd life reminds YOU however that it is NOT a game) see the new oportunity of earning money, but also virtual money which can be real money or not. Create your own store in a virtual world and earn real money. A lot of companies (to name a few small ones: Nike, Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Adidas) saw the value of this new extension of the business model and invested A LOT of money in 2nd life and other virtual worlds. Let’s add to the 7 marketing P’s the virtual P’s and you have a new oportunity to earn money. Sounds great!

Worldwide users of 2nd Life: 1.9 million users. But this is the number of who at least logged in one time (doesn’t matter if they ever returned). Take a 60% (exagerated but fair enough) gives us a number of 690.800 users who return. That means that the businesses who invested in the game spend loads of money on every single user who returns.

“One user, Anshe Chung, pays Linden Lab the equivalent of about $200,000 a year to buy land in Second Life.” (Source: SURVEY: NEW MEDIA; Wonders of the metaverse; 4/20/06; From The Economist print edition)

And this is only one of the investors. Do they believe in the power of Virtual worlds? Or are even the big companies living in their big fantasy virtual world? Was the autor of the Matrix right with his phylosofic view on the contemporary world? These are all questions which surge from the developments. But never forget the real question: Does the target group really need or is it just a few of the diehard worldescapers who will use this new virtual oportunity to start a 2nd life?

The motto is: CREATE YOUR OWN THRUTH!

Jahfed.com