Pictured: Gacha resale items listed on the official SL Marketplace at prices between USD $1037.50 and $5165 worth of Linden Dollars.
Reader “Gloom” makes an important point, commenting on last week’s post about Second Life gachas being a type of gambling. Typically, it only costs the Linden Dollar equivalent of pocket change to play them — but that’s only part of the story:
Sure you can argue it’s just pennies… but people easily drop hundreds of real life money into trying to get gacha sets. Then they turn around and take something that was a L$25 pull – to mark it up 100x the original cost on the Marketplace (I have seen multiple “rare” items going at L$2000 easily from a L$25 gacha). Then it becomes a cut-throat market.
In fact, the SL Marketplace carries gacha resale items priced as high as thousands of US dollars. (See screencap in this post.)
Vaki, the longtime Second Life user and real life attorney that I cited in last week’s post on gachas, tells me that this huge resale market for Gacha items will very much play into any legal determination of whether SL Gachas are defined as gambling by the many jurisdictions which outlaw or regulate the practice:
“It impacts whether or not the items have value, and the definition of ‘gambling’ requires someone to risk something of value on the outcome of chance, with something of value at stake,” Vaki tells me.
In my original interview, she noted that some US states heavily regulate gumball machines that typically cost just dimes or quarters to play, with the chance to win but a small prize:
“This was my point about gumball machines: if there’s nothing of value at stake, it’s not gambling, but some states consider even a little trinket or rubber ball to be of value.
“If gachas give you something worthless, they aren’t likely to be considered gambling,” she goes on, “it is their resale value (and their high resale value) that makes them more likely to be regulated. In other words, make gachas no_transfer and you solve the SL problem real fast. But no one would ever do that.”
This is an important piece of the gacha question I should have discussed in more detail before: A Second Life gacha is like a gumball machine… but with a chance to win items as valuable on the open market as an actual car.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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