Man Pours His Life Savings Into Video Game Digital Property

I think we can all say that, at some point, we’ve made some questionable financial decisions, whether that’s been buying too many games when you’ve already got a massive backlog to get through, making some costly drunken purchases, or, if you listen to some of the financial advice thrown about these days towards the younger generations, buying coffee and Netflix subscriptions. Skip that latte and you’ll be on your way to buying a house in no time! Because that’s how that works.

Regardless of your Amazon order history (I’m not here to judge), I don’t think many people can say that they’ve ever invested their entire life savings into buying land in a video game. You know, digital land. Not real. Lines of coding and chunks of pixels. 

You can obviously still make poor choices with your money on physical objects, not just digital things. Remember when Logan Paul spent millions on Pokémon cards, only for them to be fake?

As reported by TechStory, that’s exactly what one man in Texas has done. Justin Reed has thrown a whopping $18,000 (almost £15,000) into the 2003 MMORPG Entropia Universe, and is now the proud owner of Khorum Coast. Or rather, his avatar, named ‘David Joker’, is. That seems appropriate, somehow.

You’ve probably already figured this out, but Entropia Universe isn’t your typical MMORPG - it uses a micropayment business model, which allows players to buy in-game currency with real money. While that might just sound like your usual microtransaction business, it’s a bit different - players can convert this back into dollars at any time, and all virtual items have a real cash value. 

Getting back to Reed then, he claims that within four years, he’ll start to get a return on his investment - he’s apparently already earned back $1200 since he made it in March. Even before then, he’d been playing the game for almost 20 years, and earned $5000 from it, which he used to help pay for college. 

As for how his investment works, he’ll supposedly get three percent tax revenue whenever another player finds something in Khorum Coast, for example, if they do some mining there. Reed argues that if he’d invested that money into a real business, like a bakery, no one would have bought anything from him. 

For his sake, we can only hope this works out for him, and that the Entropia Universe servers don’t get shut down any time soon.

Topics: Real Life