[larrydag]

I immediately thought of this too. Could there possibly be a revenue opportunity for these game developers that they are missing? Should the game developers focus on the gameplay with economics in mind so as it should be a an objective and not just a byproduct?

[patio11]

Yes. The US MMORPG companies resisted the Korea/China Free2Play model, where you sell advancement fairly directly for hard currency, for cultural reasons. (My read is that their business guys were totally clueless and their devs had passionate hatred for selling advancement. They wanted you to earn advancement the proper way: by dropping out of school and devoting your life to the game.)

Every gold farmer was competing on price with someone who had INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; available to them and the manual labor was winning.

There were many folks who said that there were solid commercial reasons for this refusal at the time. A lot of them boiled down to "I don't know about those crazy Asians but sophisticated American consumers don't want to do this thing that we're spending thousands of man-hours a month unsuccessfully trying to prevent Americans from doing." Those have been pretty decisively proven wrong since a) when AAA US MMORPGs experiment with item sales they make serious bank and b) the Free2Play model empirically has worked very, very well in the US, especially when you compare the revenue per user and in aggregate against the HUGE premium embedded in development costs of the AAA subscription RPGs.

Oh, also, Zynga ROFLstomped the entire industry. (10~50% of the revenues of the most successful MMORPGs for 2~3% of the development costs of the median AAA MMORPG... and they did it more times in a three year period than there have been successful AAA MMORPGs in history.)

[buckeyeCoder]

REAMDE (http://www.amazon.com/Reamde-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/006197...) by Neal Stephenson is an interesting, fictional take on what might happen if an MMORPG embraced the farmers.

It's also a really quick read for a Stephenson book.

[9999]

I don't know how this slipped under my radar, thanks for the recommendation!

Play Money is a fantastic non-fiction account of online gaming economies if anyone wants a more extensive non-fiction treatment of the topic.

[timwiseman]

As you say Zynga proves it can work for some games.

But I can also understand the resistance to it. I only just started playing my first MMORPG (SW:TOR), and as a player I think it would bother me if they openly sold advancement to the people that would be in the PVP matches with me. I know a certain amount in the background is unavoidable, but that is fair easier to tolerate than having the company sanction much less be involved in it.

So, if the amount of money they would gain from the purchasers exceeds the amount they would lose from people with my opinions dropping the game, then from a business perspective they should do it, but it comes at a cost. Of course the middle ground is to do it on some servers and consider outside purchases cheating on other servers, but even that might turn off some potential players that see it as distasteful.

[intended]

Actually its not Zynga - I think the original was a Korean MMORPG which set the tone for other AAA MMOs.

The f2p model was tested with a lot of other games, both in China and Korea. I think gunz online was one of them.

Anyhoo - the major American brands resisted because of the cultural idea behind an MMO of the time - as in a world, which you subscribed to be in, and act within.

Being able to pay money to advance faster than other people broke the golden rule of immersion the original founders/artists had in mind.

Dont forget, this is now a bygone age of gaming - where people created games as an extension of their imagination and a hope to enact cool things in character.

Today those drives are still there, but completely leashed to the need to ensure profitability.

Its led to more attempts and games, but you now don't have things like sprawling empty wastelands in the barrens of WoW. Every square inch has been maximized to ensure that it has no dead spaces, or environments which let people advance at anything beyond the average rate decided by the designers.

Most designers for MMOs will avoid selling advancement enhancing goods - it destroys the game in the long run.

The model they use is one where if you aren't paying, you are the content. They need to make sure it is egalitarian at a gameplay level.

Beyond that, its free for monetization.

[samstave]

Too be fair, zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure. So while syngas direct development costs are low, the real cost of developing what was required to provide zynga the platform is over a billion. (considering Facebook stated their network inf investment has been 1B)

Also, zynga is an idea thieving bandit of a company - so their costs are also far lower due to their hiring people that can copy as opposed to the thought leaders who would have come up with original content.

But if the only metric you choose to measure them on is revenue to expense, then by that myopic unethical lens - sure they look good.

[aaronblohowiak]

> zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure

They are facebook's largest advertiser, IIRC. Additionally, I believe facebook has invested in zynga, so the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic. I am anti-zynga, but its important to be accurate in our critiques.

[samstave]

I agree that it is symbiotic, but they are still a parasite :)

[Tangurena]

Ahh, no. Sales of credits to fund RMT in games like Zynga is where Facebook's largest growth in revenues come from: about 30% of the sale price of the credits goes to Facebook. Games like Zynga's make FB users more "sticky" and spend more time on the site which helps raise advertising "hits".

[samstave]

In what way does that refute what I said: that Zynga is wholly dependent on Facebook's infrastructure.

This doesnt mean they dont have their own infrastructure - but it is different than an MMO company like SWG/WOW that have their own infrastructure for 100% of the game.

The point made was that Zynga is doing what MMOs do at far lower cost. I said the cost was offset because Facebook foots the bill for the platform on which Zynga depends.

[nl]

Too be fair, zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure.

I believe Zynga provides more of Facebook's profits than any other company.

Zynga could easily argue that Facebook is a parasite by profiting from all the people who want to play Zynga's games.

[nihilocrat]

Actually, there's a major shift in the industry (to "free to play") that companies have been making. Basically, the company provides an in-game item shop where players can use real money to buy in-game items. These shops accomplish pretty much what this guy was doing, but keep the money in the company purse, and circumvent many of his limitations: there's no need to farm the game when you make the game, and you can sell items which farmers could never obtain.

In almost all cases, it has meant a higher amount of revenue, either for brand-new games or for games which transition to the F2P model or an in-between hybrid model. It looks like, generally, big-name MMORPGs are still starting out with a subscription model, but most games at other tiers are launching free-to-play with an item shop. Lots of long-running MMOs are transitioning to a hybrid model to add revenue to a product from which little is expected but also little is being spent on (just enough money to keep the servers running and keep a slow flow of updates).

I think it would be much harder these days for a player to make money by through farming, except for with the old guard of MMORPGs which still don't have an item shop. I could be wrong, I am not looking at these economies closely so I don't know if the farmers are actually able to provide items / prices competitive with the developrs.

[pavel_lishin]

> Should the game developers focus on the gameplay with economics in mind so as it should be a an objective and not just a byproduct?

Isn't that what EVE did? (Also, you might want to read Stephenson's latest novel, Reamde, for an exploration of a game company that did just that.)

[Drbble]

Eve focuses much more (industry leading) on in-game economics as a gameplay aspect , but not as exceptionally much on converting game money to real money. Second Life has a rather sophisticated and officially supported currency exchange with out-of -game currency (dollars)

[gravitronic]

Slightly tangental but I believe one of the online poker playing websites (Absolute Poker) was accused of having a rogue insider who would fix tournaments.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2007/10/17/the-absolute-poker-ch...

I realize it's not the same but it's in the same vein: engineers with an upper hand beating the in-game economy.