Surprisingly, Karl Marx Had Little To Say About RMT
As seen on Zen of Design, the Chinese are seeing the South Korean moves towards RMT legislation and saying “hm, got to get us some of that“. Of course, the stereotype of China is being part of the problem with RMT, to put it mildly, but now that the Chinese have domestic MMOs as well, their own operators are all over having the People’s Republic handle CS issues!
These recommendations made by the Ministry of Culture have gained quite a bit of positive feedback and support from major online game operators. Shanda CEO Jun Tang and Netease Market Director Hua Huang both commented on supporting the ban on private trading among gamers and via online trading platforms. According to Jun Tang, it is currently impossible to execute complete prohibition on such virtual trading at the technological end, but should be feasible with regulative support and actions taken by the police.
China has had no qualms about dictating how games should be run and even designed, insisting on state-mandated time-outs to break unhealthy World of Warcraft raids, making sure all account creation is backed by proper ID (probably to try to police the previous link), and banning strategy games that dared to (correctly) depict Manchuria and Taiwan as Japanese-occupied areas in 1936. Chinese companies are going even further, with one enterprising MMO developer enforcing proper gender selection when you create your character.
Playing female characters is always popular in MMORPGs; the characters have no shortage of gold and always wear armor several levels beyond their status – all gifts from their male admirers. The gift giving phenomenon is not unique to China, only more pronounced due to the mass acceptance of online games by both sexes of China’s younger generations.
Well, that’s certainly one way to describe it
So, what does this all mean?
- Don’t expect to sell 4 billion copies of your next MMO in China; not only is a home-grown industry far more localized than you could ever hope to be, but they will also be far more adept at dealing with the traditional Chinese bureaucracy (which far, far pre-dates Mao Zedong).
- Government will continue to intervene in RMT sales as a cheap and easy way to “do something” about those wacky horror stories about online game addiction, backed in many cases by short-sighted gaming companies eager to offload their CS problems onto governmental oversight.
- It won’t help and will only serve to drive RMT further underground than it already is. It may put companies like IGE out of business (pause for the shedding of a single tear) but companies operated out of a garage or by teens looting the guild treasury will continue to operate as a black market.
- What *will* solve the RMT problem is when companies finally either incorporate controlled versions of interplayer sales into their own games (the SOE solution). Or design around/for direct gold microsales (as Puzzle Pirates does with their doubloon microtransactions). Or just say “screw it! We’re selling gold! Come get some!” (which seems to work for Project Entropia, despite some dodgy PR). Or, maybe, in some alternate universe, games will have such punishing CS “enforcement” that RMT is stamped out entirely. Call it the China solution. Or, most likely, that RMT is eliminated by simply eliminating, you know, any player economy whatsoever.
I’m starting to come around to the get-your-gold-from-the-company-store viewpoint, even though as a hardcore gamer my inner being recoils at the prospect, simply because it’s going to come from somewhere, and having the game company exert some control over it implies that it’s being handled by people with an enlightened self-interest in maintaining a healthy in-game ecosystem – something which third party gold farmers couldn’t give a rat’s arse about. There will be some significant pushback from users about this, because, especially given the recent trend to slap advertising on everything in online gaming, they may see this as yet another money grab by the MMO developer.
Which, of course, in many ways? It is. I didn’t say it was a *good* solutionl But, as China is discovering, the child-like idealism of socialism tends to melt in the light of day, and the enlightened self-interest of capitalism often tends to be the best solution in an imperfect world.
Considering the last RMT story I posted still has an active discussion, I suspect this will provoke some thoughts as well.
As I said on IRC…
“well, IGE probably annoyed one of the major domestic operators”
This being the “new capitalism” of China.
“I\’e2\’80\’99m starting to come around to the get-your-gold-from-the-company-store viewpoint”
Um. 100% inflationary. Unless you sink the same amount elsewhere, which means that other people DO suffer for the RMT. I’ll keep my preference for CCP’s “allow the reselling of gametime for in-game cash” approach.
Now see, I think a limited or near-unexistant economy for an MMO would be interesting. Say, you can only sell your goods to an auction house an you cannot place a big higher than 3x its base price. As long as there’s entertaining content that doesn’t rely on much money, I think such a limited economy would go far in preventing gold farmers from profiting.
Not saying it’s necessarily a good idea, but considering how many MMOs have made bad ideas and are still around making a profit, I don’t think it’s something that would kill an MMO.
Buying from the company directly doesn’t have to be inflationary if the price can change, the GTC thing CCP do is just one way of achieving this.
The reason why RMT is profitable comes mainly from the fact that it is illegal within the context of the games. This strangles the supply to be done by a small niche of players who are willing to risk their accounts etc for making money. There are even more levels of corruption within the RMT deal that strangle this supply once you start digging.
If everyone playing WoW had the legal rights to sell Wow-gold to other players (like the SOE system) the actual value of WoW-gold would drop to where it practically belongs. Right down there, next to other worthless things.
Most of the WoW-gold reserve is gathered between “real players” who actually pay to play, not to invest in a bussiness. I am willing to bet that more gold is given away for free every day than what is sold for $$. If there was a legal and accepted method of making these “gifts” into belonging on an open market the price would rise just a little bit from nothing to almost nothing, rather than fall from “heavily inflated” to “a bit less than what the eBay average sale is currently”.
The average eBay sale value is most often used to “evaluate the industry” and the values are heavily skewed by corruption. Almost every “newbie seller” will be scammed by some type of shady buyer. (Usually hacked PayPay accounts or CC’s are used to pay but the transaction gets reversed by PayPal once the real owner of the money complains.) This makes a large portion of the sales inflate the statistics without any legit purchase taking place. The risk of getting frauded when selling also force the prices up a lot on the portion of sales that acutally have a real buyer rather than a scammer.
Considering these aspects of the phenomenon I am slowly evolving a theory that says the best way to kill the harm of RMT is to sanction it and turn all players into sellers with verified RL identities. A few things will still have a market but the value of ingame resources will drop to the lowest common denominator, which is sitting around at the interesting price of Free.
Freakazoid, I can’t see myself playing a communist-economy MMO. And there WOULD be ways to game the system.
Lacero, that’s printing gametime (which is, well, what a MMO provider DOES!), not in-cash directly – the in-game cash in an Eve GTC transaction is just moved between players. Which to me is THE differennce.
Wolfe, as demonstated by the fifteen-fold crash in the value of Eve ISK on Ebay* when they started allowing the resale of gametime codes for said ISK… the value is low, but not none. Also, there’s a big difference between players selling and the industrial companies like IGE who are an entirely different level of problem afailk.
(*Note that old Eve Characters still sell for insane amounts due to the skill-over-time system: A 40 million skillpoint character can fetch upwards of $3000!)
When the price falls fifteenfold the suppliers must change commodity. What things are worth much enough in a game like these to pay for industrial production of scale? (Not even a chineze farmer will consider getting 25 cents per day of labour to be enough. Which means the sweatshops are off the market.)
Im sure old EVE characters only can be manufactured by CCP, a sweatshop would most likely not be capable of producing them as goods. Maybe these old EVE characters are like the virtual equivalents of original old artwork paintings, farmers wont be producing monalisas. (Unless they haxx0r CCP which is another type of problem.)
A $3000 character sale on eBay is also a high risk trade, maybe more than half of all such trades result in the seller getting frauded by some virtual criminal. A frauded seller gets $zero for the percieved valuable character which force the professional providers to inflate the price to make break even. (If they were “producing old character” for a living.)
The only RMT trades as I understand to be worth the effort while living in the western world is either duping (and similar exploiting) or “robbing guild banks” which is a type of social engineering exploit. Legit “farming gameplay” is never worth the westerners time in the production pipeline.
Andrew Crystall wrote:
Um. 100% inflationary.
Um, so are almost every game economy out there. And, as was pointed out at the Austin MMO economics talk, inflation itself isn’t bad and in fact is desirable; Everyone likes to feel like they’re making progress, so making lots of money is fun even if buying power decreases. It’s when you get hyperinflation that things get really unfun. That means the currency becomes essentially worthless, and the company selling currency certainly doesn’t want that!
Some thoughts.
Andrew, the reason EVE’s method isn’t always inflationary is that people can earn isk (bounties/missions) or create resources and sell them to other players (mining). The ratio they’re created in determines whether there is inflation or not (and the fact they’re created at all means growth). This ratio is part of the game and is balanced (hopefully…) in the normal course of running the game.
So, a 0 inflation direct version of isk selling would sell isk and minerals, the relative price of these would depend on the amount of each currently circulating in game. In some ways this way is better than CCP’s approach because it prevents people buying GTC with ISK and then selling them on ebay for cash, although as you say characters can be laundered in the same way.
Psychochild, I disagree with the basic premise that there should be an inflationary spiral in the market. It will lead to hyperinflation at some point because its precisely that – a spiral. Further, adjusting your NPC’s and such constantly if there is to be any even remotely limited content is a big drain on the live team’s time and effort.
Mudflation is evil, and should be faced with determination and a sharp pin.
Lacero, well, it’s a LOT lower inflation than straight sales. It only adds whatever extra they ground out for the sales, and then that has knockon effects on supply for many comodifies, which means…
Woohoo!
There’s still some more room over here on the dark side. Scooch on in… a little more…
I thought UO should have charged more per month for accounts with houses (and more and more the bigger).
Used to think Avatars too, but the replay ability they add (and character transfers later, then the family member gets their own account and wants their character off yours and over to theirs) I think is more worthwhile.
Ought to just sell characters, rather than character “slots”. Un-deletable. Buy before you try.
Mules for cheap. Lumberjack is 25 cents, mighty warrior (level 1, but with lots of potential) is $5.
I don’t think you ought to stop at managing p2p transactions, but just make stuff out of thin air and sell it, even.
Or better yet, LEASE it.
Inappropriate ads are horrible. Appropriate ones are content.
Hollywood hasn’t even got this perfected, but we mostly have it stupid and irritating.
By the way everyone, just kidding about all the above for now.
“Second Life” and “There” both use the “we sell it ourselves” approach. (As does “Magic: The Gathering”, in one sense.) Gotta admit, not going to play any game where I can either spend 20 hours getting l33t stuff or spend $200 buying it from the company.
There’s another solution to RMT: design your game so that it is more fun to get gold than it is to have gold. If 90% of the playerbase didn’t regard acquiring stuff as “the grind” and dislike it, the market for RMT would be much smaller.
Ok, as to RMT it’s inevitable so why fight it?
As for in-game advertising it’s inevitable so why fight it? Well I’m going to avoid any company whose product has in-game advertising. I won’t fight it, but I sure won’t buy it either. Oh, my money isn’t enough? So you’re going to put ads in to make up the difference? Better get more adds because I’m buying less of your games.
I hate marketers.
Hey I know a few economies that are actually wonderful in game. Primarily they are Korean based platform games meaning you don’t pay to play but you can pay for extra goodies for your charactes, more bank slots, better vendor equipment, cash ect.
The armor equipment is so lvl capped that you can’t wear anything twinky. This soloution works well for both the avid players who want everything the game has to offer and the casual player who SOE yes you SOE seems to hate and loves to forget about. Only exception is EQ2 which is making vallant steps for soloing and small groups and the working folks. Attunable armor and weapons rock.