Most Expensive Video Game Objects $350,000+ USD

$9,000! Think about that... What can you buy with $9,000!? With $9,000 I could buy a car. I could buy amazing computers. I could buy every video game or other random piece of equipment I could ever want. With $9,000 I could purchase some more amazing aquarium equipment and finally set up that reef aquarium I’ve been dreaming about. Do you get the point? With $9,000 someone owned a fake ship. Literally, just a few lines of code, but real money was to be had. You have to imagine. You have to think about giving up your life for years to grind and play an amazingly complicated game in order to create an item that sits among the biggest, baddest, most expensive virtual items in “existence”. You worked really hard and you managed your finances and other in-game problems and solved them all to come out on top.

Now, I want you to imagine something else. Imagine that all those achievements or in this case that single item, is destroyed in minutes! Imagine that in a matter of minutes your hours, days, weeks, and years are gone. Completely and utterly destroyed and you are left in a world where none of that work ever mattered. You are done for and completely cold. You are left out in the rain without a penny to show for anything you ever did. That would suck. There is simply no other way to put it. That would really suck.

This tragedy took place in the massive online word of EVE Online. EVE Online is an incredibly intricate game that requires the character to buy, pilot, and blow up spaceships. It is not a game for those who have soft hearts or don’t like violence or pressure. It is not your casual arcade scroller. This pressure and fear is caused in part by the fact that the in-game currency known as ISK (Interstellar Kredits), has real life value. In the real world you can use USD or any other currency to purchase this ISK and then your real world achievements get thrown into this topsy turvy space world where minutes can destroy hours and days and weeks and sometimes years of work. The Revenant is the ship I will be talking about that was destroyed. It is one of three ships with the size that the Revenant possesses. One of three amazingly big and large spacecrafts in the online world of EVE. It took with it everywhere a staggering price-tag that equaled 309 billion ISK. It made it the most expensive and valuable piece of code in the online world- a video game.

It was this price tag. This enormous amount of virtual currency or ISK that put a target as big as ever on it’s head, or point, or whatever you call the front of a ship... spacecraft! Anyway, the ambush was set up over months of trust building and deception. It occurred with ample amounts of intrigue. It was the Pandemic Legion who received an SOS and simply assumed that a player needed their help. It was a distress signal. It then turned out that their trusted leader of their fleet was not so trustworthy and in fact was a spy who was doing so for an opposing group of players. Their lying, good for nothing commander was then kind enough to lead the entire fleet (including the Revenant) into a whole army of dreadnaughts and supercarriers who tore them to pieces. It was the owner of the Revenant, a player by the name of TSID, that had to watch as his precious work, his work that had taken years to get, was destroyed in a bloodbath of code and pixels and then it simply became another momentous occasion marked by infamy in the history of EVE Online.

In EVE, the economy is a creature. An animal which is constantly changing. It lives and breathes the game and the people who created EVE (developers) actually has an in-house economist that monitors the virtual world. He works to curb inflation or introduce new types of technology which consume currency. It is literally a virtual Federal Reserve that sells bonds to lessen the total supply of cash.

This game is not the first to witness terrible events like the one mentioned above. It was only eight months ago that a $6,000 pair of blueprints was destroyed by a group of players. Losing a $9,000 spaceship really stinks, but that is not the most expensive video game object. The most expensive video game object belongs to a player in a different online world called Project Entropia. That item is a $350,000 space station. Yes, you read that right. $350,000!

The space station is called Club NEVERDIE and it is a virtual night spot. It was originally bought for $100,000 by John “NeverDie” Jacobs in the year 2005. It is a nightclub located on a very large asteroid which orbits the planet Calypso. It made history for being the most expensive virtual item ever in the history of the online world. Then It was overtaken by the Crystal Palace Space Station which, in the year 2009, sold for a USD sum of $330,000. That blew the previous $100,000 out of the park!

The Crystal Palace Space Station’s reign as most expensive virtual item ever was soon brought to an end, however, because today Club NEVERDIE has been sold to John Foma Kalun for the staggering sum of $335,000! Also, before selling off his actual space station Jacobs had sold different areas or zones of the asteroids. These are known as Biodomes and the sales totaled $300,000 USD.

So, what do you think? You’ve heard about thousands of dollars of USD being exchanged and lost in a matter of minutes. You’ve seen intricate games that rely heavily on players and the groups they form on trust, only to be destroyed when someone decides they want to create history and gain some infamy. You’ve seen a man make hundreds of thousands of USD simply by playing a video game. Really, that’s all he did. He’s just very, very good and I think we can all say a bit lucky. It’s incredible that things like this happen and are still happening today. Someone out there is winning thousands playing online and someone else is losing thousands doing the same thing. Is it modern-day gambling? Or, is it a legitimate hobby or even career? How much do you respect the skill of these gamers? What do you personally feel about the giant leaps that are being made today in our society when a virtual item can be worth more than anything you own that is “real”? What is “real”? I think that the boundaries and limits of today's society are being pushed and pulled and someday they may very well tear apart. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just as crazy as the guy who bought that Space Station online. I think it’s amazing and scary and interesting all at the same time. So, what about you? Let me know in the poll below.