Game talk

For better or worse, the consensus developing among gamers is definitely that microtransactions are a bad thing. Witness The microtransaction song, from Shacknews. And today I read in a thread on Joystiq or Kotaku (no, I can’t tell them apart, and don’t lynch me over it!) the cute summary that “Companies and gamers like different things about microtransactions. We like that we can buy things fast. They like that they can put everything under restrictive licenses, sell you incomplete games, force you to overspend buying points in blocks, and ding you over and over for stuff that should have been free.”

It’s going to be hard to fight that perception.

In a comment here on the VentureBeat article I wrote, Steven Davis stated,

I was with you until your final comments. Outside the US, MMOs/online games are moving to a Virtual Asset Purchase model. They are selling you the songs while sitting by the campfire is free (though you don’t get many songs until you pay, to strain your metaphor). Second Life should be the same. Where they have run into trouble is that they do not manage “song creation” / virtual asset creation by their players well so their DRM system is not effective – and has begun to undermine the player-driven economy. Whether it is possible to do so in a system like Second Life is a subject of a different discussion, but “song sales” seem to be growing rapidly as the business model (according to Gamasutra, microtransactions now drive about 50% of the Korean online game industry).

Well, yes. But no, at the same time.

Read More “Are microtransactions actually the future?”

Covered also on TerraNova. Finally, Korean Governement are to Illegalize RMT. is an article over at Virtual-Economy.org

What does it say?

Read More “Korea goes after RMT”

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat asked me to write a brief article on the CopyBot thing, and here it is: Investing time and money in virtual worlds: Caveat Emptor.