So, we handed in our paper on Second Life June 1st, but obviously I’m still interested in the subject…
Therefore it’s a pain to see Susan Wu held such a great seminar on the subject of virtual goods and why people want to spend money on objects that consists of nothing more than 1’s and 0’s. The key point would be that they don’t buy an object. They buy an emotion. A gesture for themselves or others (like buying flowers for the other users at Hot Or Not).
Robert Scoble was one of the moderators and he has been kind enough to share a bit of the material surrounding it, so here is a list of the liveblogging posts that he shared (I haven’t read it all – obviously there’s a lot of material, but skim it and you’ll have an idea of what the main points are):
Virtualworld.com 1 2 3 4 and 5.
Pop-pr wrote something as well and 3pointd wrote about virtual goods as the next business model in two posts.
So, a lot to read, but it’s an interesting subject that will be much more extensive in the future.
UPDATE: Just found out that GigaOm wrote a great post as well.