I thought I was talking to a madman. The guy, in some sort of competitive frenzy, rode out one of the most powerful forces of nature and borrowed on his equity to play Asteroid Tycoon. But when he started explaining his profit model, I remembered how blurred the lines between genius and insanity usually are.
While the nightclub is his main entertainment draw, he says the majority of time people spend on the asteroid is inside the 20 biodomes he's created. Inside, players listen to live streams of the music in the club and hunt exotic creatures he's specifically bred to produce valuable loot, and they also mine for rare minerals. "I tax everything that's dug up, all the loot, essentially," he tells me. "I have a 5.5 percent tax rate. It's automatically deducted. ... You don't even miss it. I think I've got it worked out that, on average, I make about $1.50 per hour [per person]. They're not paying me, that's just the revenue on their turnover."
His strategy is working, too: In his best month, he's cleared $20,000 gross profit in taxes (meaning players have churned over $363,000 in loot in one month), and he's paid for the asteroid in eight months. That's $100,000 in less than a year, for what's essentially a one-man operation.
"In the real world, a nightclub in a major metropolis will easily do $5 million a year," he says. "This is the number one nightclub, really, online. Once I think people start to go to virtual reality as quickly as they go to a website, imagine the traffic of the number one place to go!" Jacobs estimates, given the square footage he has now, he could increase his revenue by 20-fold, or up to $400,000 in revenue per month. All he's waiting on is more digital pilgrims, which he's working on leading to his promised land.
Visiting Xanadu for a Championship Fight
Inside Club Neverdie, about a dozen people are standing around, all trying to sell their loot. The chat window fills up with pre-recorded macros; everyone trying to move something. What Jacobs sells is success, the idea that you, too, can achieve the Digital American Dream, starting from nothing and amassing enough wealth to buy your own asteroid, your own otherworld. Just standing in the room, looking out at the disco and the biodomes, you can all but smell the opportunity mixed with tinges of desperation.
The Control Room is bustling. A few little Neverdies are parading around in their purple suits, and girls in teddies in any number of colors are milling about. That's when I see him: Jacobs' Neverdie is dressed in warrior gear, in distinct red armor and glasses hidden under a helmet. People know him by visual cue. Wherever he goes, people follow.
He takes me on a tour to where he creates his monsters; his own Frankenstein's lab. He says he spends over $1,000 per month on the special DNA he needs to tweak each monster. Lately, he's been cultivating cotton-dropping monsters. "Jeans have just been introduced into Entropia Universe," he tells me. "So there's been, like, a denim revolution. And the wool is only found on one particular creature. People want to hunt them in a controlled environment." He explains that he's specially bred creatures that drop lots of wool, and he's spawned a ton of them, giving people a reason to hunt where he can tax them. "If you're hunting for an hour or two, you'll kill thousands. If you're hunting on the planet, you'd be lucky if you find 300."
We move into the two nightclubs on the asteroid. The first is a small, old school disco complete with a checkered floor, but it is empty. We stroll over to the second, which is huge. Hard house music starts booming through my speakers as we enter. Giant statues of silhouetted naked women rise three stories from the ground up to the ceiling. Two people are dancing. The maximum capacity (if the club were real) would probably be around 180. Given how packed the Control Room is, I figure most people are focusing on the upcoming event.
