I was reading an article a bit back about some words Jeffrey Steefel said.
“…we all know that something will happen in the next two to five years to business models in general, so we’re paying attention to what’s going on; watching what’s going on with Sony Station whose servers support and manage this.”
He’s very right. Something in regards to allowing purchase of in-game items will definitely happen. But I don’t think he’s thinking big enough.
Let me take in into the future, the maybe not to distant future, a dark future some might say, a grand vision others might suggest. I say a future that is inevitable.
In this future, you log into your MMO, similar to how you do now, but instead of being greeted by the latest changes, notes on the world changes, etc, you’ll be greeted by the deal of the week, “Click here to buy a mount at half price!”. If you, the intrepid gamer, were to click there, you would be brought to a page that shows a price, lets say $10 cold hard cash, and asked to confirm your purchase price. And if you confirmed, by the time you finished getting into your character, you’d have a deed to redeem for a mount in your backpack. No long quest, no requirements that you can’t meet yet, no harvesting two bazillion of some creature/resource. Just a few clicks and you’ve caught up with the Joneses. Well, kinda. Because I bet you haven’t yet purchased an elite mount or super fast hooves for your new mount and so on.
At this point you might be saying, ok, yeah, I can see that, it’s coming. But here’s the part you maybe aren’t seeing. This dark super-future will also so you just about anything else in game you want to buy. And it will be guaranteed. Yep, guaranteed. If someone hacks into your account, or you at the very least claim they do, you will be refunded either the money or just be given back the loot. The company will be responsible for your items and you will be unable to lose to them game bugs, server crashes, etc. Because the MMO company will be legally required guarantee everything they sell to you.
This future MMO company will be required to do so. And they will have records to back up all transactions in and out of the game that affect their game. You will be able to log into your account and see all purchases made on your account, when, what and to what character it was given. Maybe even where you traded/sold it eventually. They will do all of this because laws will have been passed that require virtual property to be recognized as actual property. When you buy something in the game, you’ve bought it for good. Maybe you can’t hold it in your hand, but you own it all the same.
This crazy future MMO will not only sell you items of actual value, they will sell most everything in the game in one way or another. Don’t want to spend the time working up to a Xth level char? Click here to buy one. Saw a really cool weapon on some guy down the way? Only costs $50 to have one of your very own.
This is coming. It may not be soon, but I guarantee MMO companies are only going to be able to get by claiming they don’t allow buying/selling of credits/items in their game for so long (and what’s with going after the little people when IGE has been around forever?).
What Would Matt Do: Wonder how the game will be played when the pellets can be purchased in advance…
11 Comments
Even if it’s not a case of buy any and everything you see, you’re close to what it will look like. Wouldn’t you spend a fifty cents on a hundred health potions with no cooldown and full health regen? It’s only 50 cents . . . you can blow one or two in every battle, or have a whole bunch for taking down boss mobs.
Except tiered items, with purchased items looking different even if they have exactly the same stats. There will be derision from the people who can afford to spend 120 hours camping mobs for the rare plate set of uberness, but people who can drop $30 for a same-statted, different looking set probably won’t care.
When I’ve asked my wife if she would spend $10 or $25 or even $50 on a mount, it’s always been an ecstatic yes. To save her the time and trouble of farming would be worth it. She’ll buy gold, accounts, or items if it means she gets to bypass the not-fun parts of a MMO.
I can see your point about separation, but I don’t think that will be enough, items that look similar but aren’t. I think it’ll be the same items and either all of them won’t be purchasable or there will be a limit to the amount purchased by one person or something.
It has to happen though, as you stated, because people are more than willing to pay for it. If Blizzard is smart or some other company that can make a good MMO, it won’t be too long either. It’s a virtual gold mine just waiting to be mined.
If you think it’s a virtual gold mine, find out the attach rates of already existing implementations of this. The Godfather game for the 360 allows you to buy money/items/cheats using real money. Have they been successful? Has there been a lot of grumbling from purchasers of the game?
I’m leery to call doing this “smart.” There are plenty of ramifications of allowing this to occur that aren’t being talked about. The result of flooding the market with in-game currency is that auction house prices will go up. Inflation will happen. And that 1000 gold you just bought for $50? With hundreds or thousands of people adding millions of gold to the economy, they will spend very very liberally and prices will rise, and soon that 1000 gold/$50 just won’t be enough. People will either pay up or quit. I’m not sure that the tradeoff will be worth it.
I was playing FFXI when the chinese gil sellers had blowouts on their stockpiles, and virtually overnight those stockpiles were now a real part of the economy and prices on everything got jacked high. Now the stockpile mules have been banned left and right, and the overall total gil on the server has dropped drastically. All the items are now reasonable compared to ludicrious from one year ago.
So no, I don’t believe it’s smart or a virtual gold mine. It’s something that would drive me away from their game.
There won’t be inflation. Gold will sell for whatever price said future MMO company sells it for. If everything is purchasable at a set price, there won’t be any inflation.
Of course this all requires an MMO that has a big draw, like WoW, and some game besides getting pellets (gold/items).
The godfather game doesn’t count, it wasn’t an MMO. But I hear XLBA in general pulls in a pretty penny. Heck, I heard Oblivion optionals sold in the millions. Neither of those examples are for MMOs either though.
If you’re looking for proof of whether this will work or not, just check out the huge industry behind farming gold/items/characters. That’s a LOT of money just waiting to be tapped into by some smart, hungry MMO developer.
You don’t understand what I mean by inflation. I mean the in-game economy. Unless the game is 100% built around only buying items with real money, this is going to be an issue (and if the game is 100% based around buying items with real money, why would anyone in their right mind play it?)
If there was 1 million of gold in circulation in the game one day, then all of a sudden there’s 100 million, every item in the game is going to rise in price due to the ability of (some of) the people to pay that rise in cost. That affects people who aren’t paying extra real money to buy more in-game money. They either have to spend more time farming, suck it up and spend their real money, or flat out quit. And from playing MMOGs for the past 4 years, the 2nd option, the one you seem to be advocating, isn’t what the vast majority of players would choose or even consider choosing.
In Final Fantasy, people who were known to have paid real money for gil and/or characters were shunned and mocked. I really don’t know anyone who has bought gold or got a paid PL or anything in WOW. People don’t talk about it (other than complaining about the spam), and for the most part, it is neither difficult to level nor accumulate gold in the game. It’s amazing how huge of an industry it is when I can never tell that someone has taken advantage of it. My gear is pretty exceptional, and all I can say is that it is due to my own playing and some luck here and there.
The XBLA examples are perfectly valid for comparison, especially in the Godfather case. People have the option to pay for money/items/cheats that they can achieve just through normal playing. Which is exactly what you’re advocating. Doesn’t really matter if they are different genres. At the very least outright dismissal of the comparison is foolish.
So in the end it may seem like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’d be leery of saying that the rainbow isn’t ugly nor full of spikes and nasty things. (in other words, don’t expect everyone who plays WOW to openly accept this kind of extortion)
Suffice for me to say, microtransactions can be nice, there are uses for it, but to use it for every little thing is not going to be appreciated, and most likely not going to be as accepted as you might think.
Ok, I’ll definitely agree with your first point. But I’m really envisioning this is as an all or nothing sort of dealie. If you’re allowing the purchase of some items, exchanging of gold for currency, etc, it’s going to be very hard on your economy if you don’t allow it all to be part of it.
That being said, yeah, I’m not sure how the game part fits into that yet. The big draw to WoW, and most MMOs, is the next Thing™. But I bet people are sitting around trying to figure that out right now.
As for people not buying gold in FF. Of the people I knew that played FF, 50% of them bought gold. Literally.
It’s incredibly prevalent. The only thing holding it back from even more people is that fact that it’s not condoned by the big MMO makers…at this point.
So overall I’ll definitely agree that the idea of micro transactions sanctioned and run by the creator of the MMO has some problems yet to be figured out, there is too much money involved for people to not be trying to solve them.
Think about WoW. If tomorrow, Blizzard allowed people to buy a little pet that didn’t affect the game at all, but looked really cool in game and was reasonably cheap, how people would skip buying it? 50%? 75% That’s still millions of people buying it.
Or even worse, if Blizzard decided it was too hard to get the flying mount and started allowing you to purchase it separately. ANYONE that doesn’t already own one would buy it. Think if they had allowed that from the beginning of the expansion. EVERYONE would have bought it. There are 10’s and maybe 100’s of millions of dollars to be made in the MMO environment with micro transactions. In the popular MMO environment.
I can only give you my experience. In FF, I played for over 3 years (I still have an account but rarely play), met hundreds of people and I don’t think I could name even five who admitted buying gil and didn’t face any reprocussions for doing so. Of course, that doesn’t mean people didn’t, it just means that if they did they did so on the QT. It’s the same way in WOW, though I’ve been playing far less and know less people. So experience definitely influences our opinions.
I’d like to take a step to the side and look at the math of this.
WOW has, lets say, 8 million subscribers. At $15/month, they are pulling in $120 million/month from the monthly fee. I don’t believe making every item for sale will fly too well, so let’s say that only 25% stick around for (WOW2: $$$ edition). To recoup that $120 million/month, each person would need to spend an extra $45/month on top of the monthly fee. That’s $60/month for a single game ($720/year). That’s a pretty steep payment. Even with a 50% attach rate, each player would need to spend $30/month (combined) on the game. That’s more manageable, but who is to say that Blizzard would price things cheap enough that only $15/month on purchases was even possible? I’ve never seen any addon-type transactions costing much less than $1, so who is to say that this trend will stop? Why would they want it to? It seems like gouging will be the story here.
And back to my original train of thought:
You seem to be talking out both sides of your mouth here, too. On the one hand you envision it to encompass every item in the game. On the other you’re giving an example of a single item being available for purchase and that it’d be popular. You may very well be right that some (many, who knows) people would jump to buy something they thought was out of reach. But what about “level 7 mundane sword”? How about the level 30 tunic that does nothing special?
The case that works for you is the bling bling, the rare and difficult to obtain items. When those items are not bling bling, are people going to be beating down the door to pay extra cash for them?
Also, I’ve been looking at it pragmatically from a possibility point of view. What happens when you look at it from a legal standpoint? By selling currency and specific items (instead of a service), it’s going to open up ownership issues that these companies may be loathe to deal with. What do you think?
I wasn’t really talking out of both sides of my mouth as giving examples of different ways.
As for the last part, yeah, that’s a big step. But I really think it’s coming. The money requires MMOs to get involved, the involvement in making their currency/items have real world value will require extremely interesting terms of service and lawyers. And when they get sued over their sure to be ridiculous TOS, that will be what defines the law on virtual property.
I think we’ll see it easily within the next 10 years, virtual property having a legal value in our system. Probably less.
The reason I said you were is that using an example of a single bling item makes it a bit more… palatable. Compared to saying you would expect it to be used for any possible item in the game, which especially at lower levels would be the complete opposite of the mount example. People would loathe having to shell out real money for low quality items.
Matt,
What are your opinions on the after effects of developers adding RMT as an integral part of the game design? To explain:
1).What about classism where income versus time played is concerned? If a player is on a shoestring budget already and cant afford to spend cold hard cash on in game items, and is forced to play the “grind” in order to get a certain item/foozle or whatnot, dont you see that as slap in the face to those gamers who prefer to keep the sanctity of the “magic circle” intact?
I think that allowing players to use cash in order to get items in a vrtual world, where there is nothing to be gained other than having a “shiny” to show off, is insidiously stupid. There is nothing even remotely associated with “gaming” when you remove the competitive aspect of using the games own mechanic of obtaining items and it completely breaks the magic circle that “games” are designed to provide.
Mank
We are so on the same page. Allowing players to purchase in game items will lead to classism. And yet, think of EA. Do you think they worry about social issues like that or that they worry about anything but the bottom line? I don’t.
It’s going to happen. It’s going to start small and then grow. With all of the money out there in the illegal gold buying market, we’re one big time MMO creator introducing it to it becoming a normal thing in MMOs.
An old adage says, follow the money. The money here is sitting in the coffers of IGE and their ilk. You somewhere, some CEO is going, “That could be our money!”.
Sad, but true, I believe.