During last 3 moths I tried to jump deeper in new, growing, virtual economy. I’ve tried to analyse virtual societies and reason why people decide to live in virtual worlds. What opportunities bring new trends for investors and how can looks like the virtual future.

Results of this research are multi dimensional:

-        reasons of development and existence virtual worlds

-        virtual societies and psychological aspects of living in virtual worlds

-        micro economy of inside virtual worlds

-        trends, opportunities and risks for investors from real world

Current virtual worlds, societies and economy are on early development stage. Real people are going into virtual worlds searching generally entertainment. Virtual spaces gives people one main opportunity, which is not available in real world: they can begin life many times with “clear account”. From other side, they can be someone who they are not able to be in real world like properties owners, investors, artists, etc. Virtual worlds are visited generally by young generations, which know very well new technologies and new virtual life style.

Participation in new life style is very expensive, but not in the same way as in normal life. The cost calculated in US dollars are rather low, but the participation in virtual reality is consuming extremely time.

The inside economy of virtual worlds is steered by companies like Linden Labs providing virtual worlds infrastructures. On current development stage, from one side the regulation are not very restricted and from other side are limited to implemented infrastructure functionality. In my opinion both treads will develop in the future and the restriction level will grow.

According to infrastructure there is one trend, which in my opinion will have important influence on the virtual life development. This trend is an integration of virtual infrastructures and open standards for worlds and artificial beings behaviour. 

Currently, the real business can generally profit from three general sources of virtual worlds and societies:

-        providing infrastructure of virtual worlds

-        trading virtual goods

-        promoting and testing new trends and brands (value added)

Manager can ask what to do with this new fast growing trend. In my opinion the answer depends on company situation:

-        for small, new, growing or having none stable situation companies the new trend can be not interesting – too high costs (money and time) and not sure incomes,

-        for big companies and investors with stable incomes, the new trends could be interesting for investment, but with high risk and possible high revenue.