Entropia Universe announced in recent weeks that it was teaming up with CRD, an offshoot of the Beijing municipality, to build a virtual universe able to handle 7 million users at any given time. At the time, David Liu, chief executive of CRD, estimated that virtual worlds could conceivably generate some 10,000 jobs in China.
Even Second Life, with its claimed userbase of 7 million, rarely has more than 40,000 users active at one time-- which means that the population of this Chinese venture, if successful, would rival the world's largest nations. Bill Ives of Social Computing Magazine recently took up coverage of the venture, pointing out that virtual economies allow residents to "keep the intellectual property rights to their own creations, and [allow] anyone qualified to create their own open source applications to work within the virtual world.These conditions offer great support [for] economic growth in the new world."
