http://www.eq2flames.com/general-gameplay/16896-soe-licenses-3rd-party-rmt-company-game-virtual-property-sales-43.html

Anyway dealing just with RMT and not the other barriers, it basically boils down to a couple of things. The first thing is that in most games you gain money by sitting there mindlessly bashing mobs, mindlessly crafting, or mindlessly running delivery type quests. That is boring as hell, and it takes up a lot of someone’s time. Your average PC gamer (30 years old) has 1-3 hours per day to play your game, and they don’t want to spend 2 hours of it doing boring things.

Too many games have made someone’s virtual worth all about the gear they wear. So people who don’t have the right gear don’t get in the fun groups. In order to get that gear, they need real or virtual money to outright buy it or in-game money to craft it. Once they have their phat lewt, they get in the good groups. So the guy who has the money but not the time is going going to buy what he needs so he can skip through the boring stuff, and get to the good stuff.

This also goes into the RMT for powerleveling services. I have paid for powerleveling services in two games in recent years because I simply don’t have the time to slosh through the boring stuff, and I can’t keep up with my friends who can play more than me. So I can be left behind and quit the game, or I can pay someone to level me so I can keep playing with my friends. Most games force you to quit or pay for powerleveling because their grouping mechanics penalize higher level people from doing anything with lower level people.

CoH has a sidekick program that’s cool, but it sucks for helping lower level people catch up with the higher level people. Also if you get too far from your higher level mentor you become a newbie again and die easily. The lower level guy brings nothing to the group because he’s only got access to his low level powers, and thus the brilliant idea ultimately fails.

The other side of this is guild based advancement. Many guilds need to have a lot of things to offer their members in order to attract and retain new recruits. Therefore they are willing to buy resources they need to craft things, develop a cool guild house, or even buy Powerleveled characters that are specifically tailored to help the guild achieve PVE or PVP goals.

IMHO if developers want to crush external RMT services, then they need to be willing to offer the same type of service. People are always going to be crunched for time and willing to buy premade characters, uber items, gold, etc. You will never crush the external market so long as games are stuck in a “massive time spent = game advancement” model.

Or developers could simply have a system that lets people powerlevel their friends easily, have good item drops as a standard part of the game, develop a flat leveling curve so that after a certain point levels don’t matter a whole lot while speeding up advancement to that point, make a solo game more viable with missions that can be done in 60 minutes or less, and giving guilds the tools they need to actually help their membership.

But otherwise sitting here crying about RMT is stupid because it is a direct result of poor game design that doesn’t fit the profile of a 30 year old gamer with a professional career, real life responsibilities, and money to burn so he can bypass all the bullshit you find in today’s game design.

Funcom GMBH: AoC on 360 and PC; if there will be achievement points on the console side it seems likely they’ll add something for the PC release – not a huge surprise there. We’ll see…
Sony Online Entertainment: already has a MT strategy, has a portfolio of (largely) weak titles — falls under the “why not?” business strategy category.
10TACLE STUDIOS: has been tapped to develop MTV’s VW project — archetypical MT property
Acclaim: offers Chinese and Korean MMO ports, so…
GoPets LTD: is more VW than game, already has MT
and finally Ping0 Interactive Limited: yes, they indeed are maintainers of Hellgate London, but more to the point, are wholly-owned by Flagship and closer to Valve’s Steam in ultimate purpose. Seems logical too.

So, on the whole, the only really shocking aspect to this announcement is the amount of funding they received for this venture. That’s a lot of Aerons.

I still think it’s about rarity value – having a sword-of-might where anyone can buy it is not exciting. Having it where people think you have earned it is much more enticing…

Someone needs to get hold of those marijuana scare movies from the 50′s and update it for RMT.

Secondly, is there any evidence that the 2 billion dollars would somehow wind up in the developers pockets? No! RMT is popular now, because people perceive that they are buying an advantage in their game of choice! Once the developer starts selling the items, that perception is out the window and the people that used to buy their way ahead WON’T PAY TO PLAY THAT GAME because there is no advantage to it.

That is why RMT will morph into some micro-transaction system and end up at about the same revenue as the current subscription model, but at the cost of jaded gamers like myself.

As a player, this bothers me in the sense that it removes some level of “I worked as hard as X to get where I am”. Sure, it would be nice some nights to just flat out send blizzard 20 bucks instead of trying to get a drop or five, but it wouldn’t improve the game at all. Heck, it would pretty much reduce high level Not-The-Best items to non-use.