http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe

Has anyone played it? Making money by playing a game sounds too easy to be true.

I think you have to play it well. Like you can win money playing poker, but the house gets its cut either way. Or you're just "farming" perhaps.

Sounds "legit" in the sense that it is what it claims to be (based on a 10 second cursory glance at the Wikipedia article), but like Arthur said it is going to be like a casino: the house always wins and you most likely will lose more than you win. If you happen to play the game really well then perhaps you can make money, but I'm skeptical that you could ever make enough to live on. For starters you should probably never actually buy any of the in-game currency (everything you spend it on will be at a loss by design and it sounds like the exchange rate is currently fixed, which sounds like a faulty design, but I'm sure they have the freedom to change it on a whim). Any in-game currency you do acquire should be earned by gameplay. Go ahead and cash that in, but good luck making money on it. It probably works out to significantly less than minimum wage. Considering organized crime has been apparently doing this for years perhaps this is an experiment to see if they can catch lazy criminals using their system for money laundering, etc. Organized crime is probably the only way this game could function IRL so I expect the governments of the world will crack down on the developers before long...

Considering it's been running for over a decade, it's probably fairly legitimate.

Yes, not investing any real money into it seems wise. Reading more about it, to actually make any money, one is supposed to treat the game like a business, as in, not have any fun but rather just farm and/or produce stuff for others to buy.

This of course will only work if you make money from other players because otherwise, if you could easily just make it from farming the in-game "free" stuff, the developer would be bankrupt soon.

You probably also have to pay taxes on any cash-outs.

append:
Ok, so I installed it, spend 30 minutes customizing the avatar, then puked all over the shitty UI and uninstalled it again. Not going to waste any time on this.

If I wanted to waste my life playing a "game", I'd just go sit in front of Minecraft with a few dozen mods installed, making a ginormous solar-energy farm that generates steel tanks full of UU-Matter while powering automated harvesters and planters which get me lots of wood, rubber and cactus for the purposes of magically creating Alumentum through an alchemical process, which I then throw into a giant Steam Boiler powering 18 Industrial-Grade Steam Engines powering various machines which can pulverize all the ores I get from my quarry, doubling the output sent to my redstone furnaces, finally piping the resulting ingots all throughout a logistics network into walls full of barrels.

...erm...

Do you have video of it in action?

No because I was making up the idea as I went along using the basic logic of how the various mods interact.

That said, right now in my current world I'm focussing on IC2 power production and will be doing a lot of automation with Applied Energistics soon.

My previous run was an attempt to do an early start with Forestry and Extra Bees so that I could farm limitless redstone and generate huge amounts of power using Redstone Generators... mostly worked except there's presently a bug with travelling entities in pipes of all flavours getting lost when a world is loaded.

My previous run before that focused on mixing AE with Logistics Pipes and using Thermal Expansion for ore processing, avoiding IC2 completely, as well as using gaseous glowstone for lighting. That world died somehow while I was hitting sugar cane and I haven't the vaguest idea why it crashed so hard and so unexpectedly to the point where it won't even load up in NBT Explorer (used for editing raw world data).

My previous world before that had a little bit of everything because I wanted to delve into Thaumcraft more-so than usual.

...I'm actually pretty well versed in several mods now, having been playing a dozen hours or so every week for over a year now. I partly blame Tomasu since I started learning the mods on his own server... which he never actually played on while I was there.

If you DID do that with the camera going, you could be a hit on youtube.

I got bored pretty quickly... It felt too much like work to set up some of the machines

And now that we have a (more or less) vanilla server, you still don't play (or install overviewer).

Yeah, I get bored easily and tired..........