The nascence of great ideas often have intriguing origins and such is the case with Empire Avenue. Duleepa Wijayawardhana had a revelation while scrolling the Facebook pages of his friends.
“We were just sitting there going, you know, there s got to be some sort of value to all of this,” says Wijayawardhana. “Oddly enough, we started talking about a passage from Das Kapital, where [Marx] says everything that you do any good you produce has economic value. And if it has economic value, then it can be trade-able. To us, he may as well have been talking about virtual currency.”
“With Empire Avenue, players can buy stocks and earn dividends based upon how much friends post to Facebook and Twitter, purchased using real money. We have our own self-contained economy, but we want to fuel the real-life economy,” says Wijayawardhana.
“Then there’s Second Life, where Malevay Studios has made over $8,000 selling pets called Meeroos. Other than spending about $500 on [a bank of] servers . . . it s just pure profit,” says Malevay’s Roy Riggs.
“Facebook is another prominent example, helping to lead the virtual goods economy to $2.2 billion in the U.S. this year and around $12.5 billion worldwide. I really think [Facebook would] like to see Credits used as a virtual currency for everything for real world goods and everything else,” says Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Security. “Facebook would like to replace Amazon they re just not going to tell you that.”
“Facebook, Google and Apple are all likely to be bidding for the top slot as the one virtual currency to rule them all. I think there s a real case to be made that this is a war of standards,” says Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, who has written extensively about virtual economies. “My vision of this is that this is largely dystopian because what I know about monetary economics is that single currencies are best. You don t want to have multiple economies because economic policy does best when you don t have a million wildcat banks moving in different directions.”
Source: AdWeek
