Virtual space club sold for $635,000. No, really

A virtual club on board an asteroid in the online game Entropia Universe has been sold by its owner for a cool $635,000 (£395,000), the BBC reports.

The club was sold by British virtual entrepreneur Jon Jacobs, who operates under the online alias 'Neverdie'. Jacobs made headlines back in 2005 when he purchased the then-unnamed resort for a honking great $100,000, a sale that broke the record for the most expensive virtual purchase ever. (The record-keepers clearly never witnessed the under-the-table sale of our godlike World of Warcraft character.)

Since then he's clearly re-grouted the floors and polished the discoball, because operating the virtual club NEVERDIE (yes, named after himself) has been bringing in a yearly profit of £125,000. Tidy.

Entropia Universe, which owns a real-life banking licence, allows in-game objects to be purchased using Project Entropia Dollars (PED). At any time a player can redeem their PED for real-world money at a fixed exchange rate. That means in-game items have actual cash-money value.

For more confirmation that massively multiplayer online role-playing games are essentially soul-draining work simulators, we read on Jacob's Wikipedia page that the original plan was to sell club NEVERDIE in one single $500,000 transaction, but instead individual pieces of the asteroid were sold off separately.

Eight of the 20 biodomes, the club's stadium, nightclub and the naming rights were sold for $335,000, with the rest of the cash coming from the other 12 biodomes, which had already sold for $25,000 apiece. The grand total: $635,000.

That sounds like a lot of work. And an awful lot of money. We recommend everyone reading this to stop immediately and start buying up in-game real-estate. And let us visit your space ranch when you're gazillionaires.