LOS ANGELES, Jan 21, 2009 / FW/ — While Silicon Valley was getting ready to pronounce Second Life as a DOA, it gets a new breath of life (pardon the redundancy), with e-commerce.
In a report by Venture Beat, Linden Lab has bought Xstreet SL and OnRez, two burgeoning online markets where Second Life members can buy hundreds of thousands of virtual goods to decorate their virtual characters, or avatars, their property or their surroundings.
The same report says that the virtual goods business has expanded to a a $1.5 billion market, but Second Life was engineered in a the days before the business model was fully proven. Linden Lab residents exchanged more than $360 million worth of virtual goods and services in 2008, making the virtual economy and the ability to make a living one of the big draws of the virtual world.
The report claims that top merchants in Second Life have made more than $500,000 (?) in real money in 2008.
In short, there is no recession at Second Life. Should we all move there?
[MARIKIT YAMATO]
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