Entropia becomes a bank

 Posted by (Visited 13842 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 212009
 

Ars Technica reports that Project Entropia and MindArk are in the process of getting an actual banking license.

…a Swedish video game developer has been granted preliminary approval for a real banking license by the Swedish Finance Supervisory…

…the game itself has proven to be incredibly successful, having generated over $420 million last year.

Now, though, MindArk’s going to be just like a bank in the real world: it will be backed by Sweden’s $60,000 deposit insurance, offer interest-bearing accounts for its clients, feature direct deposit options, let players pay bills online, and apparently will offer loans to customers.

And another long-standing prediction among virtual world watchers begins to come true: that virtual worlds would eventually become fiduciary institutions.

GDC and GamesBeat next week

 Posted by (Visited 4825 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 202009
 

Next week I will be at GDC in San Francisco, and also at GamesBeat ’09, but only for half the week. I’m not speaking very much — a couple of very short presentations. I’ll kick off the Worlds in Motion Summit with a look at the big trends over the last year in virtual worlds, and I’ll be giving a little bit of a forward-looking glance at the next ten years of games at GamesBeat.

As usual, I will try to liveblog (and this year, tweet!) sessions as I can, but honestly, I don’t know how many sessions I will get to attend…!

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