Interesting interview piece here:

MMORPG.com: Project Entropia Q&A

Project Entropia has been going for some time now, but I don't really know a lot about it. On the face of it, it's just a variation on the Anarchy Online theme, but with the big gimmick of a directly linked real-money to game-money economy. $1 buys you 10 Game Dollars, or vice versa.

Naturally I first saw this announced, back in the day, giggled a bit, made all sorts of self-righteous snortings about 'Games Should Be Free' or similar, then moved on and promptly paid $15 a month for the next ten months for a more traditional MMORPG which probably made me very angry and ended up costing 50 cents an hour for the majority of my subscription anyway. Paging Dr Irony!

The only time I'd seen or even heard of Entropia since was when one rather keen player hit the MMO news by forking out $26,500 real, actual, live beer-buying dollars, for an island in a computer game (or about 10-15MB of data on a database server some place). Again, I dutifully laughed with everyone else, and forgot about it. Turns out that far from being a stupid rich kid with way too much pocket money, the island was purchased with sub-letting and residential development in mind. Not so stupid now, eh? As long as the demand is there, and the exchange rate is maintained, it's no more risky than buying up a brown-field site in a real town and building houses, and potentially as profitable.

And then SOE blows up with all this 'Exchange' nonsense, and amid the furore, a small voice at the back of my mind, largely ignored in the confusion, is asking 'Where have we seen this before?'

The guy from Entropia seems somewhat smug in relation to SOEbay, and to be fair, he has every right to be, although gloating is never seemly. But yes, a system even more advanced along the path of MMO Capitalism than the proposed 'Exchange' already exists, and for all the chin-stroking and outrage, I've not seen ONE pundit take on the job of going into Project Entropia and getting a glimpse of the future firsthand, and reporting back to us! I'm not sure they even have anything on this at Terranova, although to be fair, all the small writing and big words make my head hurt after a while, so I may have missed it.

(Even SirBruce doesn't have anything on this game, which just shows how 'under the radar' the title is. Incidentally, do read his report on E3, possibly the most useful and comprehensive round-up of the show I've seen for the MMO fanatic. I'm such a SirBruce fanboi.)

Entropia offers the obvious 'carrot' of being able to turn grind hours into big bucks. Conversely, people with no time to grind can buy their way past it, and the whole thing is supported by the game, in a (presumably) safe and secure environment. On paper it seems...well...a lot more fair than it ought to. But the problem remains; I have no idea if this works or not. Is it a traaaaaaaap? And more importantly; cash or no, is the game actually any good?

So in the selfless spirit of blog-based cutting edge journalism, Project Entropia is next up on Operation Cheapseats! Watch this space...