Future of gaming?

[tanithryudo]

Interesting article on virtual transactions based online gaming - actually, interview transcription. It's dated July 07, so fairly recent in terms of the technology.

Speakers are:
John Blakely of Sony, who as far as I can tell, owns the only ingame selling/buying service that didn't go defunk for a popular MMO (see Station Exchange for EQ2, though I hear they're closing that in favor of a third party deal...)
Mark Jacobs (VP EA, Studio GM EA Mythic) - no idea who he is
Raph Koster (President Areae) - no idea who he is
Erik Bethke (CEO GoPets)
Matt Firor (moderator)

I have to admit though I that I find it hard to follow who's saying what and has what opinion. But I do get the impression there's several conflicting opinions in there. @_@

Comments

[cashew.insanejournal.com]

Okay, here's how I parsed it:

John Blakely - Does not seem to care either way. Defends both sides and seems to believe there's no right or wrong business model and both works depending on user base. Owns: games with RMT business model.

Mark Jacobs - Opposes RMT/microtransaction. Owns: Dark Age of Camelot&Warhammer Online, uses subscription model with optional cash shop option.

Raph Koster - Supports RMT/microtransaction. Owns: Metaworld, not clear what business model although seems to function on RMT.

Erik Bethke - Vehemently opposes subscription models. Owns: GoPets, uses RMT/cash shop model, with optional subscription. (Makes me wanna play GoPets again. xD)

So generally, people who own subscription games with optional RMT finds the RMT model without profit. Those who operate on RMT with optional subscription find subscription without profit. Personally, I'm gonna go with Bethke on this one. People are always more likely to pay for what they want and only what they want if they can avoid having to buy the whole shebang. (Look at iTunes, people would rather buy just one - or a few - track than a whole album.) Those who pay an obligatory subscription fee are less tempted by cash shop items.

And although this is just a few company's point of view, I think you can extrapolate from it that games without subscription fees most likely will profit from online cash shops. GW is just being stubborn.

(Currently, the only down side to cash shop MMOs is that they're all located in Korea, so the English version is...filled with horrible translations and makes the game hard to follow.)

[xinqing.insanejournal.com]

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