Bill is a millionaire again? oh shocking… Zzz.

In the case of second life, Linden Lab owns the servers but are selling Anshe and Guni the right to control what happens on the virtual space supported by those servers. That right has a value which is established by the market. Anshe and Guni can then turn around and sell subrights to what happens in parts of the virtual space supported by those servers. Even if we say the rights they purchased from the Lindens are passed on to the customer(not clear they are), A&G acquire new rights (rights to receive tier payments) that have book value.

How do we evaluate the value of that asset (rights to tier payments)? Well, as Guni says, the current market suggests that a sold out sim with residents making tier goes for the same price as a naked sim. So a natural way to evaluate the asset on your books would be as par value to an empty sim.

I don’t know how they do their books, but you could move the assets from category “virtual real estate” to category “tier contracts”, or you could just leave it as “virtual real estate” and regard the tier payments as lease payments and the intitial “sale” of your real estate as being the first payment on the lease.

It would be like Bill Gates claiming wealth for stocks that his employee’s owns.

A better example would have been the IGE founders. They for sure are millionaires from externally-driven TOS-violating RMT in multiple game worlds. This is remarkable and makes them pioneers, unlike the Chinese kid that tried to emulate them. Comparing the classic RMT traders to Anshe is like comparing apples to peaches, however. For example they are millionaires in real life but not avatars with a million$ net worth. They are out of character and clearly stand outside the magic circle.

I estimate that 35% of sim land has been sold, 15% has been rented and 40% is land in new sims that are still under development and not yet released. Another 10% is land for sale on the mainland. This means that about two thirds of Anshe’s land holdings would be liquid within 30 days if she wanted to sell out. The L$ to cash part also wouldn’t pose a problem. The combined currency exchanges have a total volume of about 100K US$ per day. Anshe’s forture represents no more than a third of the monthly volume of Linden$ traded in a single month. If spread across 3 months that would be about 10%. It would just disable Linden Lab’s ability to sell new currency on LindeX for a while, or the rate would drop from 270 to 300. But even then, who cares?

In addition, we had investment companies evaluate ACS. While I am not allowed to disclose any of the details, Anshe’s share would not have been less than the stated value of her avatar. That already was a couple of months ago.

which is not to say that those assets aren’t liquid. I just don’t know enough about the contracts with end users (residents) to say how liquid they are. Can they be purchased? Traded? Are they transferable with the sale of the simulators? The sale of the whole company? I don’t know but I’m guessing yes.

The other thing that no one is considering here is that booting the residents and selling the simulators naked on the market would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Obviously these things have enormous return on investment once she develops them and sets up a neighborhood management program. Why everyone thinks the company can’t be worth more than naked servers is utterly beyond me. My guess is that the actual value of the company would be the value of the simulators times some number N, where N is larger than 2. Possibly way larger.

Anshe has already sold all that land to island owners who live on the land, so she doesn’t even own what she says she owns. ie: she can’t sell the island without paying off the people who’ve already bought the land from here.

Hamlet is right, but for the wrong reasons.