Vercin

I also believe it has to do with a lack of good games for it. I bought a 360 a few weeks ago and couldn't be happier - almost. I love the all-inclusive Live service, and the handful of good games the system has. But I'm slightly disappointed. Looking at the racks at Gamestop or the pages of Amazon.com and not finding a single interesting-looking game outside the ones I purchased over the past couple of weeks is sort of disheartening. I'm actually really sort of surprised things turned out like this. After the hype at launch and the fairly easy Windows to 360 programming, you would think far more third party developers would be making games for the system. When all of the good games coming out over the period of a month or two are for the noticably 6 year old system instead of the pretty, powerful one, it really makes you think.

I'm not worried - I'll get a PS3 some time next year, and the lineup for the 360 looks good over the next few months - but still, how the hell did they let this happen?

@fawazr

Personally, I wouldn't mind higher taxes in general if we were to get some more useful programs in return instead of the inevitable fattening of politicians' or lobbyists' wallets.

But that's not the issue. Storyline or not, Second Life is a game. The government has no right to tax virtual currency. If one were to, at some point, sell the virtual currency or assets for real-world money, then they could tax the real-world money.

Say you own some property in Second Life that increased in value, and you paid a capital gains tax to the U.S. government. Then the company running the servers goes out of business or for some other reason shuts them down. Then you find you have paid taxes, REAL-WORLD money on an item that does not, and never really did exist. This doesn't even bring up the problems that would arise from trying to tax players from other countries or children that play to hang out with friends and don't have money to pay these sorts of taxes.

Like I said in the first comment, since Second Life and other MMO-ish passtimes are games, taxing them is akin to actually taxing Park Place or Oriental Avenue. Unless you sell your Monopoly money for real-world currency, I don't see how the government would have any right to tax it.