SLBoutique is making headlines today for being the first online store to sell a real world item in exchange for virtual world currency. The item is a GeForce video card and it's selling for 20,000 Linden Dollars (US $73). From the MTV blog (yes, they have a blog!):
What's genuinely unusual is that earlier this week the store's owner started selling something real — computer hardware — and he did it by attaching a price tag that's figured not in greenbacks, Euros or even pesos but with Linden Dollars, the virtual money earned by playing "Second Life." You heard right: Shoppers are able to use play money to buy something real.
"I'd be completely lying if I said I knew which way I was going to go with this," said the Boutique's owner, Tim Allen, who in real life works as a tech specialist in Pennsylvania but appears as the purple-haired FlipperPA Peregrine to those who meet him in "Second Life." For now, he is just experimenting with a new sales strategy designed to cater to users of an online world whose developers claim plays host to $240,000 worth of buying and selling of virtual goods each day.