The collective Slashdot hivemind shoots some questions at Sparter, one of the newer RMT players.
I’m concerned that this platform is devoted to promoting activity that the largest game (WoW) explicitly forbids. How do you plan to handle the fact that the entire premise of your site is one that could get your “customers” banned from the games they play?
Sparter Executives:
Good question. Here’s how we see it: publishers do not have the right to tell gamers that they can’t accept money from someone outside of the game.
You gotta fight! For your right! To parrrrrrrlay!
Most of their answers actually center around Sparter’s conceit that it isn’t really gold farming, but innocent trade between actual game players. A quick browse of the auctions disabuses that notion fairly quickly — in the above link at the time I checked, literally every single listing appeared to be from a gold farming shop. (RMT executives would never lie in interviews, would they?)
This section in particular amused me:
Sparter is trying to be proactive on this issue by requiring that all our users recognize the rights of content originators and the limitations of gamers’ rights. Third, we estimate there are several hundred B2C web sites in operation, most outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. Lawsuits are not going to be effective in shutting down RMT. As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. So let’s figure out the best way for the demand to be served and take control of the situation for the benefit of gamers and the industry as a whole.
So… Sparter requires that its users recognize the rights of game publishers, but you know, everyone ignores them anyway, so why not just let us make some money off of your work, hm?
If you want the tl;dr version, a comment by a Slashdot reader is +5 insightful/funny:
For those unwilling to read, they essentially said: “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and one more time, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.”
This is a common refrain by RMT merchants. “Oh, it’s those other bad people that cause all the misdeeds in games that you see. Not us. Gold sales in and of themselves isn’t bad… it’s just when bad people do it. We’re not bad people, oh no. We’re the good guys. Trust us.” Ironically, that is how IGE got started, as the white knights fighting manfully against those bad people at Yantis Mysupersales. Just before IGE bought Yantis. Now Yantis owns IGE, IGE…er, Affinity doesn’t own IGE, and every observer involved is suitably confused, as befits a completely above board and ethical business.
So what can we learn from all this? Yes, boys and girls, it’s time for a PUNCH LIST.
- RMT isn’t going away. There is a market for it. Litigation and regulation will shape the market but it will not remove it.
- RMT-related abuse is one of the largest challenges facing MMO providers; there’s no motivation to lie, cheat and steal quite like cash money. RMT gold farmers, without fail, aggressively use whatever exploits are available: speed hacks, teleport bugs, dupe bugs, scripting, botting. They have to – the more that they sploit, the more money they make. Business is serious business.
- MMO providers can’t afford to stick their heads in the sand about RMT. Either they need to have aggressive enforcement of their policies (which will send their customer support costs into the stratosphere, as World of Warcraft is discovering) or they need to co-opt the farmers and take the money off the table somehow (see: SOEbay).
- The future of MMOs is in Korea. This means that going forward MMOs will have what Korean MMO players tend to call “item shops” or “character shops” – things you buy with cash. Usually these are cosmetic items that have little to no impact on actual gameplay – but not always. Many games sell gold, items… everything an RMT provider would.
- The Western market is not the Korean market. Attempts to simply clone a Korean-style character shop often blow back on their creators. To date successful Western company-run RMT shops simply sell alternate currencies or in some cases the real thing. However, in my opinion, this doesn’t scale well; for larger games this won’t actually solve the gold farming problem, but will actually encourage it as people try to bot farming in-game currency and converting it to out-of-game currency.
- Why do I keep going on about this? Because it’s the future. Because game companies HAVE to take control of the RMT market, whether through bringing it in house (the “capitalist” approach) or making the game’s economy RMT-resistant (the “socialist” approach). Because if nothing is done, online games will become like email traffic – 99% spam for gold farmers aggressively chasing after ever-shrinking margins. And that, more than anything else, will spell the death of the online game industry.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Litigation and regulation will shape the market but it will not remove it.
It might not remove the market, but it might remove MMOs entirely, or at least the means of making a profit off their development and maintenance, to the point where gold farmers are making more than the developers, who are constantly fending off lawsuit after lawsuit and fine after fine.
Only the arrogance of the Western game industry is to blame.
Here’s a thought.
Develop a business model that doesn’t rely on monthly subscription fees for the mass of your revenues. Or, barring that, don’t count on the majority of your players staying subscribed for months and years on end.
Wean yourselves from that teat, and you can go about making a game that doesn’t require players to put in massive amounts of time in order to experience the content, have fun with their friends, blow off steam, whatever people play these games for.
As long as these games put massive amounts of time between players and whereever they think the “fun” is, they will continue to be tempted by the prospect of buying gold (and gear, and characters) from the third parties.
they said it best, “As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply” Take WoW for example, you could easily eliminate money from that game in its current state, take all the factions have reputation be like honor and that’s your currency with that faction. Take away the auction house and stuff, then you get into bartering and such, which might be too much of a pain in the ass for the farmers to setup a business around.
It’s not like you need gold or isk or adena or whatever in a game.
I hope your MMO is so socialist, I can’t level up without Stalin’s approval.
Gold spam is a technology issue. WoW has, in the course of two patches, eliminated it almost entirely, and it didn’t require restructuring the entire game’s economy.
Don’t assume that creating a barter economy will fix the problem. If farmers were lazy they wouldn’t be farming around the clock. Look at Diablo 2 — gold was meaningless, and for a while Stones of Jordan were used as the baseline currency of trade (an item that was useful for everyone). Despite that, you could and still can buy D2 items all over the web.
@Scott: What’s your opinion on not just facilitating trade like SOE does, but actually creating wealth (and potentially max-level characters) for players willing to pay the company? As in, I pay Blizzard $100 and they generate 10,000G for me to spend.
Asian consumers are happy with it, but it makes most Western consumers recoil. Most successful Western company-run RMT schemes isolate the RMT transactions from the act of generating raw in-game currency.
You don’t hear about Puzzle Pirates players selling gold.
At least, I don’t.
It seems to me that the future for handling RMT really does lie in the “partnering with publishers” realm. While the Korean market != the Western market, I think we’re seeing a generation of future gamers being raised on microtransactions in the U.S. With monetized kids games (like WebKinz), it seems to me that we’re teaching our kids that “cash for in-game boondoggles is ok.” That’s fine with me.
I’ve purchased $L for Second Life to help move along a building project a bit faster (more land = more prims = faster prototyping of large buildings). I’ve never purchased cash or items in a normal MMO, largely because if a game makes me buy shit to feel like I’m having fun, I refuse to play. Somehow the utilitarian purchase of cash in SL was different. Likely because that world was built on rock n’ roll. And furries. And Gor. And RMT. But I digress.
Taking the business in-house will only do so much to prevent third party sales. IIRC, there are still plenty of opportunities to buy shit for EQ2 on non-SOEbay servers. Sure, these companies are doing stuff with shell corps and subsisidaries that seems hinky to us on the outside, but when you try to use your RMT money hats to purchase content companies, it makes perfect sense to at least put forth the image that your content enterprises are separate but equal to your RMT concerns. Until the quality of “reportage” on those content sites falls thru the floor, I would hesitate to call them the Fox News of MMO-related content sites.
Well,
A company generating in-game cash directly is afaik a bad idea. It’s inflationary, for starters. Allowing trade between players for “real world” currency dosn’t directly increase the amount of cash in the economy in the same way. Actually, Eve’s “we print gametime” RMT has allways struck me as the best idea.
Jolly Pirate Lum said “Asian consumers are happy with it, but it makes most Western consumers recoil”
I think “Western consumers recoil out loud, but in private a sizeable number actually use the service” would be more accurate. It ‘s the equivalent of the Porn industry in the 80′s. Very few people would admit to using it, but enough people really did to keep the industry blossoming. Plan for RMT tto happen via 3rd parties in Project X no matter what you do, unless you include it yourself.
The funny thing is that I am a staunch capitalist, but I absolutely despise RMT and what it has done to WoW.
Shouldn’t have to apologize for any RL leanings about economy. Games are supposed to be fun escapism. Concerns about economy usually aren’t about making games more fun, they’re about keeping them from being made not-fun.
Does anyone play WoW as an economy simulator? I was under the impression that current MMOGs have forgone robust economies in exchange for simple quests and a modifiable hot-key bar.
Does anyone play WoW as an economy simulator? I was under the impression that current MMOGs have forgone robust economies in exchange for simple quests and a modifiable hot-key bar.
There’s only one way to take RMT out of gaming, and that’s to make it so that everything that can be gotten in-game has no value (or such little value that it simply doesn’t pay to farm). Otherwise, there will be RMT trade going on of whatever it is that has value to players.
Want to do away with RMT of game MMOney? The game would have to not only sell the MMOney themselves, but sell it so cheaply that farmers can’t undersell them and make anything worthwhile. Or remove MMOney all together from the game. Then you still have items. They’ll sell desirable items, so you have to sell them first, and again, at such cheap rates that they can’t afford to undersell you. Or simply not have items to get in the game, buy them from the company only.
Games like this wouldn’t be much fun, in a well rounded sort of way. They wouldn’t be “worldly” at all. There would be no trade system, since players can just buy everything cheaply, or only get them, by buing them from the game company. In which case, yes a player can sell something to another player, but they’d have to do it at a loss. This kind of game couldn’t have looting, or stealing, or any other traditional PvP type play except combat itself. It wouldn’t have hunter/gatherer play, or RMT traders would once again have an outlet.
I hope you can see that trying to fight RMT by joining RMT would have to take out alot of game play to succeed.
To me, if you want to make a game that has items that can be traded, and has value to the players, then you need to take away the ability to effectively farm. There are ways to do this.
-You can take out static spawns that drop items of value
-You can make static spawns that depend on time of existance to accumulate items of value
-You can let players lose their gear if they die
etc.
This won’t remove RMT completely, but enough things like this can reduce it’s impact enough to make it a non-issue.
So has anyone spent time comparing the merits of the two approaches to control RMT (“socialist” vs. “capitalist”), how it affects the game design (and avoids removing the fun elements) – any success of one approach over the other ?
Just curious thinking about the future game designs…
Many believe the future MMOs will follow Korea’s “Item Shop” strategy. There is money out there but whose is it? Unless the game design changes, the demand for gold and items will still be there.
@Scott: As a game designer, how do you see the success of microtransactions in Korea being applied to future US games and at the same time be as much fun as WoW.
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