It makes a certain amount of sense to protect your home with a homeowners insurance policy. Auto insurance protects your vehicle. What about all that cool loot you earned while playing your favorite online video game? Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation now offers insurance for your virtual stuff.
If you aren’t a gamer, then some explanation may be required before you understand what the policy offered by Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation is all about. It is quite different from cyber insurance, (which has been in the news lately).
Cyber insurance is something that corporations can get that will provide them with some financial assistance to take care of problems that were caused by hackers. Sometimes, when a corporation has become a victim of an attack by hackers, it results in a data breach.
This means that important, sensitive, information that customers gave to the company, (such as credit card numbers), could have been accessed by people who shouldn’t have them. The cyber insurance would help the corporation to pay for its customers to have a credit monitoring service, or identity theft service, just in case they become a victim of identity theft as a result of the data breach.
The insurance from Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation is something entirely different from cyber insurance. It is designed to protect your virtual stuff. If you aren’t a gamer, a bit of explanation may be required before you understand what this is all about.
People who play certain types of online video games put a great deal of time and effort into obtaining in game items that are useful, powerful, unique, or special to them in some other way. At least some of it will cost the player quite a bit of in game currency.
The legal way to earn that currency is to complete quests, earn achievements, or defeat monsters and bosses. Often, players will form an attachment to the weapon, piece of armor, or other item that they spent so much time trying to get.
Some of the items that a player has collected would be worth quite a lot of in game currency if those items were sold. Hackers realize this. A player may log into the game and find that a hacker has illegally accessed his or her account, taken all their in game currency, and stolen all their awesome, hard earned, virtual stuff. As someone who has played World of Warcraft for years, I can assure you, being the victim of a hacker attack would be devastating, in a number of ways.
In other words, there would be a market for insurance that would protect a person’s virtual stuff. Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation, a Chinese insurance firm, has joined with Gamebar, which is an online game operator. Together, they have created the world’s first virtual property insurance. It protects a players “virtual property” including “land” and “currency”.
Image by Lyman Green on Flickr