Virtual real estate: new players, new rules
In 2004, Ailin Graef, better known by her avatar’s name Anshe Chung, began amassing virtual real estate in Second Life. She started with less than $10, and became famous for becoming the first avatar to achieve a net worth of more than USD $1 million from business dealings conducted entirely inside a virtual world. Much of today’s excitement about virtual real estate and NFT speculation can be traced back to the mythology surrounding Anshe Chung.
The key to speculating on land in the virtual world is to learn the new rules. The old rules, the ones that favor the already-rich, no longer hold true. The old real estate adage “location, location, location” implies that values are set by their proximity and visibility, but in virtual worlds, players can teleport to new locations using cartesian coordinates, so visibility and foot traffic matter much less.
What matters in the virtual world is bringing humanity and life to something flat and pixelated, drawing players somewhere, and then encouraging them to return and interact. (These settlements are often called “clusters of content.”) In the virtual world, ingenuity and design matter far more than location and budget.
See the full story here: https://www.coindesk.com/here-comes-the-virtual-real-estate-boom