Can you really get rich in the world's only "cash-based" MMO?

[Music] okay all we want to do in this video is explain to you a video game called entropia universe which looks like a perfectly normal massively multiplayer game it is not that if you are at all interested in the economics history or just weird trivia of video games buckle up it's gonna be a wild ride but just two things before we kick off one at the end of this video you can look forward to an interview with mind arc the development studio behind entropia where we were able to raise some of our ethical concerns and to while i may have some apprehension about how entropia is designed i want to stress that entropia's community of players were nothing but kind and helpful and generous to me during the course of my research and it is clear that many of those people just see entropia as a harmless bit of fun okay let's get started in tropical universe launched in 2003 as the world's only cash based mmo the difference between entropia and other mmos is that where lots of online games let you pay the developers some real life cash for extra pretend money in the game entropia universe is the only game where you can also wire money that your character has back out into the real world there's even a fixed exchange rate 10 planet entropia dollars is one us dollar so if your character shoots and kills a cyber vixen yes that's a real enemy and finds a gun worth 10 planet entropia dollars you could request a withdrawal of your ped from mind arc and after waiting just a few months you would get one human us dollar in your bank account or you would if there wasn't a withdrawal fee of 1 and a minimum withdrawal amount of 100 us dollars but you get the idea the entropia players that i spoke to were adamant that the excitement and the headlines that this system creates are the reason entropia has survived for the last 20 years and why 58 000 people are still playing it today for example in 2013 a norwegian player called alan shot a monster and 33 thousand dollars worth of loot fell out in fact before games started using blockchain technology in 2017 to make players feel more secure in buying virtual goods of the top five most expensive virtual items ever sold in the history of games all five were from entropia universe they were a planet a nightclub a moon a space station and a very very very very very fancy egg players were willing to fork out these outrageous sums because in a real cash mmo having the best assets doesn't just make your character more powerful and prestigious it helps to make them richer which makes you a player richer i spoke to players who have invested tens of thousands of dollars into stuff in this game because to them it's more valuable than investing in real life property so let's recap players in entropia seem to be making money the developers must be making money because the game's still being expanded and the servers are still on oh and the entire game is free to play but that money has to be coming from somewhere right behind the glitzy headlines behind every winner somewhere there has to be a loser so let's see if we can figure out who's losing money by going through some of the different types of players in entropia the following is in no way descriptive of everything you can do in entropia because this game is massive my goodness i was briefly in a discord channel with someone who made a lot of money cornering the market manufacturing mankinis all right so that's what the mankini looks like everyone they're selling for approximately 20 pen whoa 184 holy sh but dividing the different players into broad archetypes is definitely the fastest way to bring you up to speed with how entropia works so let's do it and let's start with the bottom feeders of this particular fish tank i said you could play entropia for free i didn't say you'd like it for a deposit of zero dollars your character can work as a sweater running up to dangerous monsters and literally hoovering sweat off them with 10 000 bottles of monster sweat collected over 30 hours of play selling for one american dollar although if you deduct the electricity your computer uses in 30 hours you technically only make 57 cents or just under 2 cents an hour but wait there's more if you want to play for free you can also run around the world collecting fruit and poop from the floor let me say that again if you want to play entropia for free you're very welcome to sell turds on the open market these players might be losing their dignity but i don't think they're losing any money so let's move on gamblers make up the majority of players in entropia these are the players who put money into the game to buy the gear required to hunt or mine or craft and they're called gamblers because while entropia has grown by celebrating the players who strike it rich the reality is that the core of the game is structured like a casino in a casino all games of chance have something called a house edge which means that statistically over a long enough time the casino will always pay out less money than it takes in for example most real life slot machines have a payback percentage of between 90 and 97 and it's exactly the same in entropia all of the main ways you can play the game hunting mining and crafting cost money and they have a negative return of between 90 and 96 so if you as a new player buy all of the guns and bullets and armor that is required to hunt cool monsters and then you use that equipment until it's gone that if you pay ten dollars for it might get you an average of nine dollars worth of loot back you might get more you might get less but on average you'll get nine dollars so that kind of answers our question who's losing money in entropia universe the answer is anyone playing it on average but this rabbit hole we're in goes a lot deeper in the words of one player i spoke to it's true that you can't make money playing entropia but you can make money from the players when you see the number of players in entropia willing to wipe sweat from scorpions for pennies it should come as no surprise that plenty of players in entropia will rob you if they get the chance there were two scams that entropia players warned me about over and over and over again and the first was players trying to sell you something for drastically more than it's worth which is possible because this is not only an mmo a genre designed to be as sprawling and complicated as possible to keep players interested over the years but this is an old mmo which has had patches on top of expansions on top of hotfixes where new players will always look to veterans for advice on what anything is the other type of scam i heard about was a confidence scam where players would make friends with you over weeks or months would eventually ask to borrow something perhaps offering to upgrade it for you using their skills for free and then just never give that item back but one very high level player told me that when you really have to be on your toes is when you get an asset in the game worth 000 us dollars 50 000 is when people try to shark you and try to make money off you the highest level people in the game will try and just stab you in the back but i can at least understand scammers trying to make a quick buck when playing the game for free otherwise offers such garbage margins no the players who really scare me are the ubers ubers is the community's nickname for extraordinarily high level players these people regularly top the game's hall of fame where the biggest jackpots are recorded and they have the skills and gear to enjoy the best odds when they gamble so in this udo casino you can think of them as the high rollers a term i heard a lot of high level entropia players speak of with pride is how many planet and trivia dollars they cycle in a given year which means how many ped they spend doing stuff in the game because most activities in entropia lose you money there's prestige in saying you cycled 10 million ped last year because it means you're such a good player that you could afford to spend the equivalent of 1 million us dollars in this game because you got roughly the same amount of money back if this performative culture with ubers trying to outdo one another to appear on high scoreboards sounds like it could be quite expensive for them and quite profitable for mind arc you might be right one player i spoke to described ubers as the backbone of minddark's income but in general as i was exploring entropy i couldn't help but notice all of the ways the game makes it very easy to start gambling but harder to cash back out for example if you put money into entropia that is in your account in two to three days but if you want to cash out i asked one high-level player how long it would take them to sell all of their assets and they told me two months or maybe as long as six months if you were a really dedicated reseller and then when you request that money leaves the game and goes into your account you could be waiting another six months i was also quite disturbed by something i read in the game's end user license agreement which stated that if a player doesn't log in for 365 days their character and their skills are deleted which can't make it easy to stop gambling can it however there is a way to reliably generate massive income for your avatar in entropia without ripping anyone off it just doesn't necessarily involve playing the game the option of investing in entropia first appeared in 2004 when mind arc put a new island in the game world up for sale in an auction lasting months which was won by a player called david's story for 26 500 us dollars david was then able to sell homes on that island to other players as well as tax anyone who was hunting or mining on his land so not only did the island instantly start generating massive revenue for david it was printing so much money that in just a few years this property that david had paid 26 000 for was valued at over 100 000 us dollars and this was massive for mind arc because not only did it give the game a bunch of free publicity it carried the implication that if you start playing in tropia universe you could get rich too but of course that's not what was happening there's an economics explained video on entropia universe that describes it perfectly these video game investors are basically buying a portion of the casinos that they will operate and profit from themselves which for a lot of players has turned out very very well a distinction that even today mind arc is in no hurry to clear up if you make a new character in the game today during the tutorial if you ask an npc about investments they'll tell you that the real investment is in your character's skills that is a massively misleading comment to make in a game filled with literal investment opportunities i mean what else does this npc have to say is the real wealth the friends will make along the way since mind arc sold that first island in 2004 more and more of entropia has been sold to players in addition to parceling out more of the game's land mind arc has sold shopping malls space stations more than a dozen mother ships that can fly players between the game's planets acting as an interplanetary bus service licence is for players to open banks which are functionally pawnshops and mind arc also created items called land deeds which confusingly aren't land at all but are in fact stocks in the revenue of one of entropia's planets and you think that's nuts in 2014 mind arc made available for sale 200 000 items valued at ten dollars each two entropia players representing an investment not in anything in this game but an investment in mind arc's next game this pocket monster thing called compete and the idea was that when compact came out some of that wealth would be shared with the entropia players who owned combat ds except that never happened compact was a disaster it flopped on release development was ultimately discontinued and all of the entropia players who invested a total of 2 million us dollars in compact all lost their ass but the most expensive investment opportunity in entropia isn't buying assets in this game or helping to fund the next one it's joining the development team itself so for entropia's first seven years the game took place on a planet called calypso but in 2010 a second planet was open for players to gat about on and today there are actually seven planets that makes sense massively multiplayer games get more massive as they get older what makes less sense is that not many of these planets were developed by mind dark they were developed by in no particular order a jordanian studio a thai studio some of the game's players and a really odd american man called never die who is today working on a cryptocurrency based blockchain-powered hunter-gatherer game called america these are the teams who signed up with mind arc to become planet partners so if buying land in entropia can be compared to buying a blackjack table in the casino planet partners are investors who've agreed to build a new wing of the casino by developing a brand new planet for players to visit with a new theme and then they're entitled to a cut of the revenue what could possibly go wrong well apparently kind of a lot at worst these planet partners produce planets that are absolutely unfinished and at best they are tonally inconsistent listen entropia was supposed to have this generic sci-fi theme but the moon of monreal is full of hp lovecraft monsters never dies rocktropia is a planet themed around rock and roll where one of the areas is a castle developed in collaboration with lemmy from the band motorhead and this is how entropia so nearly got a planet themed around michael jackson as well as a planet themed around the silver screen monsters of universal studios that was when la-based c studios signed on as a planet partner but sadly those projects were terminated just a few years later so with that i think we're done with our whistle-stop tour of some of the people involved in the fascinating entropia universe which means it's time for me to get on the phone with developers mind dark just to finish this video by asking them a few questions that i have do you consider entropia universe a gambling game no absolutely not ever since inception and even 1998 entropy universe was was built with the the view of making it a skill based game okay but um poker is a skill based game but also clearly a gambling game games aren't one or the other there's clearly a skill based element in entropia but are you saying there is not a gambling element um well what i'm saying is there's quite a few famous people which have said life is a gamble um when you moved down from wherever you were down to brighton oh calculated risk or was it a bit of a gamble as well to see whether you like it when you change jobs when you go out if i take my car to work or ever if i take my bicycle there's more chance of me actually having an accident which i did three weeks ago fell off my bike and broke my collarbone um so i was really taking more of a gamble there when i was at the um taking a bike instead of taking a car that is a lovely comparison but is that you then saying that there is a gambling element in entropia no no we what we have done we have followed all of the rules and regulations to show which we have done that it is a skill based game but is it not the case that governments are only now moving to regulate areas they did not have to regulate before and entropia in being the world's only cash-based mmo is not going to be subject to the same level of government scrutiny as enormous gambling industries i can only go back to say what i actually said before we know what the rules are and if we look at the rules uh in sweden and other parts of the world which we've shown we're a school-based game that we are following the rules which are given to us to make it into a skill-based game what i'm asking is do you think those rules are sufficient so this is a quote from a debate this month on loot boxes in the british house of lords if a product looks like gambling and feels like gambling it should be regulated as gambling do you agree absolutely not that's uh it's such a narrow uh ridiculous to me statement um i i think that the the money which uh eu spends on trying to change uh antiquated old laws and they spend millions of euros thousands of hours of some ridiculous law which has been probably from a hundred years ago which they try and change which we don't even probably know about and will make no difference to us at all how can they make a sweeping statement like that it's it's a bit sort of ridiculous to us right okay um moving on entropia is designed in a way that it's possible for players to spend incredible amounts of money hunting or crafting in a very short amount of time especially high-level players what do you do to make sure that players aren't spending more than they can afford well there's information on our website uh responsible gaming so that people can go in there we want people to take rests we can actually see if they're spending too much money we ask them to contact us uh we can go through their avatar we can talk to them so we we we want people to enjoying the universe how is actually supposed to be that's what the gambling industry calls self-exclusion but this is a quote from malcolm george the ceo of the british association of bookmakers for self-explosion to be effective it requires the individual to acknowledge there is an issue with their gambling can you see a conflict between you providing tools for players to self-exclude in the manner of the gambling industry while denying to your players that they are playing a gambling game you keep on coming back for this i'm saying to you entropy universe is a skill based game yes but it's your players referring to one another as gamblers that gives me the confidence to return you're the contributor but you're talking to the skill base you're talking to individuals which are giving you their individual idea of what something is i can give you many other people which will give you a different view i spoke to entropia players who've invested thousands or even tens of thousands of us dollars into property land deeds and virtual items on the basis that that money is not gone because they can expect to sell those virtual assets onto other players but there's a possibility that entropia could become less popular in the future enter a decline and then that demand disappears what happens then to the players who are still invested okay well um just like any um we can say country any business it's a supply and demand so um this is why the fluctuation in prices of different items inside entropy universe so that um if we we made in tropo universe as a persistent virtual world skill based which um is continually being developed i'm not doubting my doc's commitment to entropia continuing um what i'm thinking about are scenarios such as the appearance of a competing game because entropia is so unique but that might not always be the case i'm thinking about new government legislation or even things like an accident or a fire at mind arcs offices or a court case um so i suppose my question is are you not concerned at all that should entropia end outside of the control of mind arc that that could be a devastating financial blow to the players who've invested and supported it most no i don't think so um the the basic functionality of the entropy universe is very sound and um it goes it's an economy and economies naturally go up and down so any kind of thing which would happen if there's a fire of mind arc uh there wouldn't be any development for a period of time and it would be people would be losing interest we would then be coming back and probably coming back even stronger if there's anything which happens in the real world which is which is happening now um which actually makes people play even more but uh i've seen the stats yeah yeah um so though all these type of type of things are something we take into account we we do have lawyers we do follow the the rules and regulations of what we can what we can't do uh we we we've been looking at uh loot boxes we've changed the minimum age of entropy universe now it's 18 years old and we've we're making sure that we're really on the spot of of doing that entropy universe is not just graphics there's a lot behind it you know balancing those hundreds i can't remember exactly how many um items individual items there are in there but there's a there's a shitload i can say uh how long was entropia operating um with the minimum age of players not being 18. uh we changed that last year wow oh so 2003 to we we did have it that um i think it was 14 or 15 but you needed your parental consent uh just one final question um i again while interviewing one of entropia's players uh heard about one player that that player knew who found themselves so compelled to appear on the hall of fame in entropia to be one of the the people who got the biggest rewards when crafting that he had to refinance his house a case of a player absolutely spending more money than they can afford um well actually i just wanted to know on a personal level how that makes you feel um i think you can just look around in in the real world and and see there's people which i know um personally and then nothing to do with interrupt universe which have got themselves in problems which uh think things happen personally which change people's lives we want to make people's lives better we want to go to help them and control and not control it but we can control their um their game play in a way so that they can be free to do what they want to do but in a safe environment as well you want to ensure that they they make sure they play responsibly yes yeah that's it there's no advantage for us as a company to to have people getting themselves into trouble if they're not still having fun when they're losing then maybe it's time to stop responsible gaming we would like to thank skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is a website for getting better at things you're not very good at for example never mind making money in entropia universe as a freelance journalist i have never been very good at negotiating rates but this week i got a helping hand by watching this series on how to value your work as a freelancer and let me tell you it's already having results [Music] chris i've come to realize something there's no one this company could hire that does the exact job that i do also i don't have the option of undercharging for my labor anymore because i've realized that to do so is to disrespect every other freelancer who does the same job that i do so my hands are tied i'm gonna have to charge double my normal fee from now on all right yeah so uh we'll send you four jeremy dodgers this month instead of the two okay yeah no that's great we'll see you soon but if you hate getting paid skillshare offers a ton of other classes from game development to video editing to just boosting your productivity and premium membership costs less than ten dollars a month and the first thousand people to use this link at the bottom of the screen get two months of premium membership absolutely free we would also like to thank our patrons for funding this video and the work that people make games does if you'd like to fund more videos like this one you can get in on the action at patreon.com slash people make games [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: People Make Games

Views: 1,246,218

Rating: 4.9349022 out of 5

Keywords: Entropia, Entropia Universe, entropia universe how to make money, entropia universe 2020, entropia universe gamblers, entropai universe gambling, MindArk, Quintin Smith, People Make Games

Id: OTPLp5u3iSU

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/fearian]

I'm going to try and explain the developers roundabout answers here, from my own experience.

I have worked on a game that had as a core concept, a way to give players real world monetary value for their progress in the game. Unlike this Entropia MMO, I can say with frank honesty that there was nothing remotely gambling about it. (And if your wondering who was loosing out and paying for this, investors, and the company folded).

Now despite this, we had to be ADAMANT. At all times, when it ever came close to being mentioned, that there was NO GAMBLING in our product and it was 100% A SKILL BASED GAME. Because the risk of Apple or Google thinking it was gambling was product death.

So this line of questioning to a guy who's game does sound a lot like gambling, who's players call themselves gamblers, is never. Ever. Going to go anywhere. You think he's going to look at Quinns and say "legally it's not, but yes, I personally consider it gambling." No fucking way. He literally can't say anything of the sort.

I think from the way he talks about it, yes. He considers it gambling, and he acts like a casino would act in all aspects of his business and responsibility to his customers. And he has made is peace with that.

But he can not tell you that on the record.

[u/_KosOrSomeSayKosm_]

Rough title made me assume this was going to be some clickbaity stuff, but was surprised to see it was a People Make Games video. Quinns is a brilliant dude, interested to watch this now. Entropia was such a novel concept when it launched.

[u/DrNick1221]

Not gonna lie, and I may be living under a rock, but I have never heard of this "Entropia" game before. And its been a thing for 17 years now? huh.

But that interview with the dev trying to completely skirt around the whole "Is this game gambling question" is pretty interesting. Guy came off as a total sleezeball in my eyes.

[u/LukaCola]

Not gonna lie, that guy sounds like a white collar snake oil salesman - trying to rationalize so hard what is clearly an amoral practice.

Quinns hit him with such pressing questions too, but not unexpected ones - I was honestly surprised he wasn't better prepared for it. Or this is just what David Simmons can muster.

I dunno. Well, I appreciate the interview, definitely - and the broad overview. I kinda wish I understood the game a bit more cause it's... Weird, and I know Quinns knows systems well enough to explain them - but I get that wasn't the focus of the video.

[u/G3ck0]

Wait, Quinns does video game videos along with board game videos?

[u/thoomfish]

"Entropia" is the perfect name for a game like this, because entropy is the property by which everything eventually decays into chaotic, meaningless nothingness. Just like the money you put into any cash, cryptocurrency, or other "investment" based game.

Edit: Also, the part where he said "we changed the minimum age to 18" (and really, the entire interview) reminds me of this sketch.

[u/Fast-Crow8750]

Reposting my comment from another thread for more discussion;

I think the MindArk developer botched a potentially strong argument... Obviously he was not going to admit that his game is a gambling service on a public format, but I think he could have still made a strong defense without conceding to that. 

It seems that Entropia and its virtual marketplace operates as a mostly free and open market. This is what seems to make the game so fascinating and is surely what draws in and holds much of the player base. With that said, if the game devs were to try and regulate the games marketplace in an attempt to mitigate instances of gambling, you wouldn't have much of a free market at all. This gets back to point that the developer TRIED to make. Everything in life is more or less a calculated risk, so where do you draw the line between gambling and typical decision making under one's own free will? Just because you could potentially fall and break your collarbone when riding your bike, does that make bike riding equate to gambling? That seems ridiculous and it would be even more ridiculous to regulate the biking industry as if it were a gambling industry. So in the scope of Entropia, there are some aspects of the game that might resemble or "feel like" gambling, but couldn't you say that paying for and playing any video game "feels like" gambling? When you buy a World of Warcraft subscription, your gambling with the fact that you may or may not enjoy the game. If you get really into the game and put enough time into it and derive enough enjoyment from it, in a way you could get a full return on your investment. If you end up hating the game, well then you are out of luck, no return on investment.

A properly functioning and fair society (or MMO) should allow individuals to act under their own free will so long as their actions are not harming the others within that society. If someone has a sever gambling problem, then they actually are harming others (as well as themselves). In such a case it actually is necessary for the powers at be to intervene. In this case the powers at be are the game devs, and this idea of self-exclusion is one example of a proper and justified intervention when a player is spending money that they don't actually have.

I think the game dev was barking up the wrong tree by defending the idea that Entropia is in fact a skill based game rather than a gambling game. It makes more sense to assert that Entropia is a free market. A free market is not a gambling market, but individuals within a free market are free to engage in decisions that may "feel like" gambling, and they should be allowed to do so. You wouldn't call America a gambling country, but you could say that America operates under the free market which can (and should) allow the individuals within that market to gamble if they so please. However, the free market will not regulate gambling with regards to individual's physical/mental/financial well being, and that is where the government should intervene and attempt to help. However, completely outlawing "gambling" is a dangerous precedent to set and it would be very hard and controversial to draw the line between making a calculated risk and gambling. If you can't make a risky bet in the casino, why should you be allowed to make a high risk-high reward investment in stock trading? Simple answer; you should be able to do both and your actions should only be regulated if you are acting irresponsibly.

Pls respond.

[u/VincentNacon]

With enough time and effort, it's possible... but only the person who put them in can only find out if it's actually worth it.

EDIT: For those who didn't watch the video... Entropia is a scam, a game built on casino concept and more, designed to lure you in and soak in your "investment" at a loss.

[u/awkwardbirb]

I also remember World of Conquest being a thing back in the day, where you could also earn real money through gameplay. It vanished awhile ago until recently it had a remake (sans real money earning.)