@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.

Just curious thinking about the future game designs…

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.

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.

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.

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.