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Virtuelle Welten/Everquest



Ein Ökonom schaut sich Everquest an:

http://www.bepress.com/giwp/default/vol2/iss1/art1/current_article.html

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In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world
called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. Having
just returned from a dangerous exploratory journey through this new
world, I can report a number of interesting findings about its people
and economy. About 12,000 people call it their permanent home, although
some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage
is about $3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per
capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of
Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at $0.0107, higher than
the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme
inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population
is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of émigrés from
various places around the globe, but especially the United States.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location.
Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San
Diego. The entire dollar-based economy is underground, since the owning
company, Sony, considers everything created in the world to be its
intellectual property. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are
making money -- with annual revenues expected to top $1.5 billion by
2004 -- and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been
with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may be the next step in
the evolution of internet (and possibly human) culture. 
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#    Stefan Bechtold   stef@n-bechtold.com    Stanford, CA, USA     #
#              http://www.jura.uni-tuebingen.de/~s-bes1             #
#   "Offline" is a euphemism for "dead".  David Cheriton, 1/2002    # 


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