Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds: A how-to guide

gamedeveloper.com:

If you are designing a multiplayer game with a “digital land economy,” especially one that involves significant investment of time or money by players, you might be headed for a problem.

Over the 30-year history of MMOs, whenever an online multiplayer game features “land-like assets,” it predictably suffers from a digital land crisis or housing crisis that plays out in an eerily similar manner to ones we observe in the real world – there's not enough land for everyone, and so a crucial resource that depends on it (such as housing), gets scalped by speculators rather than used for its intended purpose. Sectors of the economy that depend on access to land go into recession, and any game features that depend on it become unfun for everybody except the elite few who bought in early.

Ultima Online, a seminal MMORPG that has been running continuously for decades, suffers from a housing crisis that started in the 1990's and persists to this day:

UO's saving grace is that player housing is a "nice to have" feature that's not fundamental to the experience, so the crisis only ruins one small part of the game. Unfortunately we are seeing more and more games launch where virtual land is the entire point of the game, which makes them far more vulnerable to this problem.

Here's a typical headline we've been seeing a lot in mainstream outlets like The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, Fortune, Reuters, etc.:

That quote isn't the endorsement they think it is. These virtual worlds are headed for a problem much more severe than we've seen in the past, and for many of them it could already be too late to avert disaster.

By George, don't let the same thing happen to your game.

We want to help game designers decrease harmful land speculation