$400,000 Traded Monthly Within Second Life

Posted on June 13, 2005

The Guardian's Gamesblog has an interesting interview with Philip Rosedale, the CEO and founder of Second Life. Second Life is a unique type of MMORPG that has managed to to latch onto the hot concept of virtual property.

Second Life allows players to own their creations and property. Players can even build a business within the game. Second Life said that as of April 2005 there are 12,000 acres and 20,000 owned plots of land within the game. It costs $9.95 monthly to play the game. In the interview the Gamesblog asked Rosedale, "How does that Western capitalism translate into Second Life?" In Rosedale's answer he said that over $400,000 per month is traded within Second Life.

We launched Second Life without out of world trade and after a few months we looked at it and thought, "We're not doing this right, we're doing this wrong." We started selling land free and clear, and we sold the title, and we made it extremely clear that we were not the owner of the virtual property.
USD$.4m a month is traded directly to world markets in Linden Bucks on Gaming Open Market. That's USD$.4m redeemed, or Linden Bucks turned into US dollars. In May 2005, the total amount traded in-world was USD$1.47 million. There were 1.3 million transactions between 19,500 unique users.