available on the site. Players can buy a tractor for their farm in FarmVille, which enables them to farm faster, or a more powerful weapon in Mafia Wars, or you can buy more poker chips to bluff your opponents in TexasHoldEm. “Now if you multiply small amounts times 3 to 5 percent times 235 million users, you know, pretty soon that’s real money,” Kinsella says.
Some observers might shake their heads and ask why players would pay real money for virtual goods. Kinsella says, “Think about it. There are a lot of things that we do in the quote real world that are kind of virtual, if you will. For example, you send someone a birthday card. They read it, they laugh, they throw it away in the trash. That’s not a lasting gift that you’ve given someone. Flowers, for example, they wilt. So there are real-world things that you’re willing to pay a value for that are in the ones and twos, three, four, five dollars. It’s a nice gesture; it’s the right thing to do; it’s a nice thank you; whatever. But you do not expect that it’s going to have any great significance to the recipient. Virtual goods are kind of the same way, except there is literally no cost of the goods sold.”
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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