Today at E for All I had an opportunity to check out Entropia Universe for the first time. For those who have never given it a shot, it’s a bit like Second Life meets World of Warcraft. Even though, honestly, it really isn’t much like either.

Entropia Universe went live in 2003, and quickly built a fan base. The Entropia Universe is completely backed by the US Dollar. Ten PED is worth about one dollar, and you can actually cash out your PED and have it sent to your real life bank account.

Entropia also gives players the ability to sell pretty much anything that’s not nailed down. You can buy and sell your character’s weapons, equipment, and even their skills. Any player who wanted to immediately pick up the game and start playing higher level content could simply purchase skills other players’ whish to sell. This creates a real economy in Entropia that is backed by real world money.

I was told by the Entropia representative, John K. Bates, that at one point an Australian man purchased an in game Asteroid for more money than any of us have ever spent on a video game. According to John the Australian made his money back within a year, and currently makes about three-hundred US dollars a day. Apparently people have even offered him up to one million dollars for his asteroid. John best described Entropia as a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World.

You see, if you are able to purchase a lot of land, or even an asteroid, you get a cut when people hunt on your property. So if you own a popular plot of land, you could, in theory, make a living off of Entropia.

Entropia seems to make its profit from taking its slice of the pie for managing the economy. An economy which sells advertising space to players on in-game billboards, sells auction houses and even has in-game banks and stores that translate to real world merchandise.

The real reason Entropia Universe was at E for All this year was because they are on the verge of upgrading their engine to the CryENGINE 2. The CryENGINE 2 was the engine used for Crysis. The new engine allows the development of new worlds in the Entriopia Universe, and updated graphics.

Some new content in development include Lemmy’s Army which will offer in-game concerts and content from Moteorhead. There will be a great deal of new content, and much of it will be from outside developers. This will add much more variety to the game, and in John’s words “will make Entriopia a real universe”.

Something a bit new for me was a literal in-game interview that was set up for me by Entropia. You see one of the boothe represenatives flagged down a player named "Red" and handed me the keyboard. Red explained that you cna do whatever you like in Entropia. You can go out into the world and kill monsters (or mobs) for their loots. You can sell what you loot or you can craft items. Red even owned two in-game stores. He (?) told me that some of the time it's business, but since it was Friday night, it was time for fun.