Category Archives: RMT

There’s a couple of threads going on at Quarter to Three discussing Battlefield 2142, and specifically its alliance with IGA Advertising, and thus the ability to enjoy tasty Fanta ads while defending Earth from Zur and the Ko-Dan Armada or whatever.

In-game advertising is not a trend I’m particularly happy with. Specifically, when it’s used not as a means of defraying expenses, but as an additional revenue stream. With most games that have this “product placement”, the game itself isn’t any less expensive.

Anarchy Online, and now Planetside are both notable exceptions, having free-to-play modes and in-game advertising. In Anarchy Online’s case, paying subscribers aren’t displayed these ads, so there actually is something of a quid pro quo; an advertiser-supported version of the game without subscription fees. Planetside, on the other hand displays in-game ads to both paying and non-paying subscribers. And in both, the ads are sometimes wildly, wildly out of sync with their respective game worlds:

Now, I know that fighting for the suspension of disbelief is a dying creed in an online world where people argue about whether or not it’s worth going for a critical hit chance of 9% in lieu of a 10% chance to avoid stuns. But still, this bothers me on a very fundamental level, for two seperate yet somewhat related reasons.

The first reason, as I mentioned, is storytelling. Basically, once you have Motely Crue rocking your world, you’ve pretty much given up on any pretense of having your own story. You’ve sold it for a mess of pottage (and Motley Crue’s pottage? Pretty damned messy). You no longer care about a coherent user experience; you’ve sublet it out to a “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” ad campaign.

The second, and more important to my mind, is in service. People are paying for a game. They should not then become mineable revenue streams – they are customers who have paid for a service. They should not become commodities. Yet in selling out ad space within our games, we as game creators are commodifying our customers. We are saying that their worth is such that we’re willing to plop in an ad and make a few microcents more every time they log in. In so many words, we’re saying: Hey, we’re really greedy.

And it’s not just games. My XM radio (that I pay a subscription for) plays Cialis ads on supposedly ad-free stations. When I go see a movie, I have to sit through an ad I don’t want to see (for Coke or something similarly unrelated) before seeing the ads I do want to see (the “Coming Attractions” reel). We are becoming a commodified society. Every blank space is virgin territory for the marketers to move in and paint with an appeal for auto insurance quotes.

Which, ironically enough, is a large part of what I’m trying to take a vacation from by playing games. Go figure.

Simon Carless of Gamasutra gives what, to date, is probably the most even-handed coverage of IGE, asking James Clarke, the company’s Shanghai-based COO, some pointed questions about what it’s like to be a parasite on a growing industry (oh, sorry, did I say that out loud?):

However, it’s obvious that IGE does not share that belief [that RMT is a violation of the rules and EULA of several online games they service], with COO Clarke commenting pointedly: “We very much stand behind the concept of in-game property being owned by the players”, and expressing “exceptionally high confidence” that this belief is true. Of course, U.S. and international courts have not ruled absolutely definitively on the matter, and indeed, Clarke claims that no companies have ever tried to challenge IGE legally over their behavior. But it’s clear that IGE continues to find enough suppliers to allow its business to grow, despite multiple MMOs banning users for ‘gold farming’.

…is here. Apparently, done with the help of IGE for fact checking.

“Twenty to 30 percent of gamers out there in the world object to the buying and selling of assets in the virtual world. … They don’t feel it’s fair. They think it’s cheating,” said Thomas Morelli, a spokesman for IGE, a major broker of online items.

Many gaming companies, such as Blizzard Entertainment, developer of the globe’s most popular game, World of Warcraft, ban the resale of virtual assets. The company has shut tens of thousands of players’ accounts, but can’t seem to halt the trade.

Millions of gamers think the trade is fine. A thriving business has popped up on auction giant eBay and other sites selling virtual assets. Buyers say they want to enjoy the games without spending hundreds of hours working up to levels where it gets fun and frisky.

You hear that? MILLIONS. You cranky curmudgeons tired of monopolized content and spam in your virtual emails are just blips in the New Millenium!

The article does have a lot of interesting anecdotes about life in Fujian’s newest growth industry, something I suspect IGE has much source material on.

Vietnam gets into the RMT farming act.

Chinh has gathered more than ten gamers so far, and they are divided into three groups to work at their online \’e2\’80\’98trade promotion centre\’e2\’80\’99 in three shifts, playing four hour shifts every day. Staff are paid VND20,000 per working hour.

\’e2\’80\’9cThe most important thing is that we have to find skilled gamers to develop stably. We are completing standards and optimising the production procedures. It is really difficult because we only have our own experience, which we garnered from game playing,\’e2\’80\’9d Chinh said.

He told his employees that gaming is a real job, with pressures and rules. Chinh said that playing games for fun and playing game to earn money are very different, and that many younger gamers who apply for a job don\’e2\’80\’99t understand this.

FYI VND20,000 = $1.25, about one tenth as much as I paid for pho noodles at lunch today. Yay for the global economy!

From Dan Rubenfield’s modest proposal:

If you run the game, your cost of goods for item sales will ALWAYS be lower than the gold farmers.

So you want to beat them and make cash on the side? Change the playing field. You sell the items. You sell the gold. They drop their prices? You drop yours. Make it easier and cheaper for these players who want to spend the money to buy from you instead of the third party.

I can already hear the cries \’e2\’80\’9cOHNOES. Sanctity of the Game!@!@ Purity of Economy!@!@ Money!=Accomplishment\’e2\’80\’9d.

You know what? Shut up.

Sure, all we have to do to put IGE out of business is to turn up the money spigot. All it takes is about 2 days work on a web application and sticking an API on the game server. Wallah, any time you want, generate in-game cash with the touch of a button!

What Rubenfield espouses isn’t RMT: as most understand it, RMT is player trading with player (or farmer, or arbitrage trader, or what have you.) It’s still understood that the money came from somewhere. It isn’t counterfeit currency (unless your game has a dupe, which it probably does); it was earned, by fair means or foul, by someone. Rubenfield instead espouses… well, let’s call it Darwinism. In the time honored tradition of failed governments anywhere, when faced with an economic challenge, let’s just print more money! It’s not like we can’t just create the stuff. It’s not like it has any inherent value — after all, those people who ARE buying gold/items through RMT are just wacky suckers, and we might as well soak them while the market holds, right?
It’ll destroy the game’s economy, of course. And it’ll – correctly – teach your players that for your game’s administration, everything is negotiable given enough currency. But hey, IGE won’t be selling much gold on your server, because they actually have to run through the motions of running bots with the latest sploits, while you have access to the best sploit of all: a SQL query tool.

The problem with unfettered Darwinism is that it violates the same trust that we then turn around and accuse IGE and their ilk of violating. Namely, taking decisions, in enlightened self-interest, in the interest of your game’s community. Simply becoming a better IGE doesn’t solve anything, except maybe your short term money flow. And it doesn’t really show an understanding for the alternate business models coming out of Asia and casual social spaces like Habbo Hotel; even in the rabid capitalism seen in that market, company-manufactured sales are used for intangibles and subscription replacements, not a farming-shortcut.

So, what Rubenfield proposes is sort of like achieving peace in the Middle East through nuclear strikes on Sweden. It’s certainly an interesting idea, definitely original, ultimately unhelpful and probably not what anyone had in mind.

(To play devil’s advocate, I’ll leave you with one way that Rubenfield’s point would work – making your game’s currency freely convertible, but pegged to a real-world equivalent, not a floating currency. 10 Quatloos = 10 cents, always, backed by the game company at any time. To my knowledge the only game that does this? Project: Entropia. See you on the sweat farm!)

As posted by Allakhazam on his boards:

The ownership issues here are convoluted. This is how deals like this get done. The size of this is pretty amazing. This is just the announcement for our own users, not the actual corporate announcement, which will likely come much later. We are now owned by a company that owns a bunch of stuff, including IGE. They bought both of us (and several other sites as well) and then split us into separate divisions so that there is no interaction between them. You know my stand on gold selling. Before agreeing to anything like this, I wanted to make sure that there would be no interaction between those divisions and that I would have complete control over the new network, including the sites that used to be part of ogaming. So this means that the Ogaming sites and Thottbot have been split off of IGE and into our network and no longer have any connection with them.

–

I don’t like Marlboros, but I still buy oreos. I would never buy a Ford, but would definitely buy a Jaguar. Not big on Taco Bell, but like KFC. Many products you use are owned by people who own other products you may not like. It’s the way of the world. As long as the companies are run separately, most people are fine with that. If your oreo cookie wrapper had a marlboro ad on it, maybe that would be a problem. It is important to keep in mind that we are a completely separate company within a large holding company that just happens to own other companies as well.

I realize some people are not going to be happy with this, but the fact is that we are now able to do things we just were never able to do before. This gives us the financial backing and stability to really do a great deal for everyone. Before the financial backing for the site was just me. Now it is a well financed corporation.

As he mentioned, Allakhazam has always been very anti-gold farming and has turned down acquisition offers in the past. His new business partners, called variously RPG Holdings LLC and Content Holdings LLC, according to a quick Google search, include IGE, OGaming, Thottbot, what appears to be an RSS scooper-site that aggregates other site content, designed to milk Google Ads and Gay Indy.

The real motivation here is straightforward, if interesting.

IGE, which has a severely tarnished reputation among most gamers (ironically, since pre-Yantis acquisition they were briefly seen as “the good guy gold sellers”, as described in this interesting, if sometimes rumor-mongering article) has thrown a good deal of money about trying to purchase their way out of it. Thus the monthly full-page and often back-cover ads in Computer Games magazine (the only mass market trade publication still willing to sell IGE ad space), the abortive partnership with Themis Group, the purchasing of seemingly money losing community sites in bulk, and the hiring of ex-game industry executives.

This “interview” PR piece gives a good overview of what IGE would like to put forth as its spin. This was my takeoff on it at the time. You’re seeing it now for the first time because when it was topical, my employer was already in the news for vocally going after IGE and I thought it best not to throw logs on that fire. But as you can see, my take on IGE is pretty plain. They’re vice profiteers, no more and no less. Like most vice profiteers, they’d prefer to work within the law, but don’t feel particularly bound by it. And they profit off of… well, my work, and that of my friends and coworkers, so I take it a bit personally.

Thus the purchase of sites like Ogaming (which as far as I can tell is famous mainly for its ownership) and Thottbot, which has to be probably the site with the most traffic on the Internet. Note that neither of these sites are replete with mysupersales.com ads. It may well be that, especially in thottbot’s case, the purchase was simply to have an entity within the IGE constellation that was more well known than, well, IGE. And it may be simply that IGE purchased the site simply because it was available, and hey, that gold farmer money was just sitting there. Rumors have always swirled about that IGE purchased Thottbot to “put pressure on Blizzard”, but that doesn’t make a whole great deal of sense unless you’re being fitted for an aluminum foil Helm of Thought Control Warding. World of Warcraft would not spin off its axis were Thottbot to disappear.

However, Allakhazam would spin off its axis were Thottbot not to disappear. While, again, theorizing, as some have, that the Thottbot purchase was simply to put non-IGE sites like Allakhazam out of business is a bit too Machiavellan for believability, the fact remains that as long as Thottbot offered its wares for free, selling a similar service was going to be a hard sell. And here, we finally see at the end of a long series of rumor-control posts by Allakhazam, something approaching a primal scream of truth:

The value of the purchase is really obvious. Thottbot and Allakhazam are the two largest sites for the largest MMO game in the world. The two have cancelled each other out financially, since anything one would charge for in a premium service was offered by the other for free. Now with both sites, we can expand our premium service to cover all WoW players. Frankly if Thottbot hadn’t existed I doubt I would have had to sell Allakhazam. Because Thottbot existed and was giving away their information for free (and losing money like crazy to their former company who didn’t care if they made any money off it) we could not make a profit off our wow site even though it was by far our biggest expense. The company that bought both sites was smart enough to realize the potential of combining those two user bases.

For the end user, this mainly amounts to “Hope all you guys liked using Thottbot for free!”. For Allakhazam, this means that his primary competition just got folded under his banner. And for IGE? Who knows. They’re seeing heavy competition from Asian gold farmers, and the seriously odd set of sites you get from googling “RPG Holdings LLC” implies that, like all mobsters, in the end they just want to go legit as a media company.

Meanwhile, if you do /who Azshara or /who Dire Maul you’ll still see the usual names, and the world continues to turn on its axis, and people with more money than time will continue to buy gold online because, hey, it’s easy and they’re there. Even in games like Guild Wars and City of Heroes, where gold is essentially meaningless, people still queue up to buy it. So much for the theory that a well-designed game will eliminate “RMT”. Hey, it’s easy and they’re there.

There aren’t any easy answers, and there aren’t any good answers, but on the whole I’d rather John Smedley sell me my Cloak of Fire Resistance than Jonathan Yantis, all things considered. At least the former has to live with the impact of his decisions, along with the rest of us.

John Smedley, on his new “Hm, I think these blog things might catch on!” site, gives a shoutout to PC Gamer for /rude-ing IGE. (Note to SOE’s web team: permalinks are cool.)

Let\’e2\’80\’99s face it\’e2\’80\’a6farming does happen. People do get cheated. I\’e2\’80\’99m not going to suggest that IGE or any of these companies cheat people, because I don\’e2\’80\’99t believe that. What they are doing however is saying, \’e2\’80\’9cIt\’e2\’80\’99s ok to break the rules, as well as the EULAs,\’e2\’80\’9d which I think is just plain wrong. It\’e2\’80\’99s like being a fence for stolen merchandise.

(To be fair, IGE does insist they don’t break any rules. It’s just that, well, no one believes them!)

While Station Exchange’s introduction rubbed me in several wrong ways (since as an MMO player RMT trading makes me ill and as a developer I see people trying to buy their way past a game as the ultimate symptom that the game has issues), at the end of the day it’s SOE’s game to run. They – and they alone – have every right to run an RMT exchange from it; they suffer the economic and CS decisions from it and they presumably out of enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, have the game’s best interests in mind. And since they’re the ones who sunk money and sweat equity and their own ideas and labors into the game, for some reason I think they and their customers should be the one to see the financial benefits from it.

With outside arbitrage dealers such as IGE, none of the above applies. And interestingly, despite IGE’s initial “Gosh, Station Exchange is great, it legimitizes our business model, happy happy!” press releases… oddly enough, IGE still sells things on non-Station Exchange EQ2 servers. Funny how that works. I guess the people who specifically chose to remain on non-RMT enabled servers for that game? Yeah, they shouldn’t get to make that choice. It should be made for them. Yeah.

I’d go on, but I’d just start spewing random obscenities at this point, and I’m trying to quit.

Remember way back in the innocent days of the twentieth century? When we looked for the online game that would break the mass market barrier, and get, in a Dr. Evilish voice, ONE. MILLION. SUBSCRIBERS?

Those were such innocent days. I slaved away in a dot-com cubicle blowing off my lack of any real work to do by mocking these newfangled gaming things, and Clinton was still President, and Britney Spears was a talentless android.

Fast-forward to today. I jumped over the fence, and now find myself too busy at work to actually make fun of people any more. Kevin Federline makes us nostalgic for ‘Baby One More Time’. Clinton’s not President – but give her time! And the US MMO market is estimated, by most, to be at or around three to five million total subscribers. (The number’s all over the map, and really is dependent more than anything else on how much churn World of Warcraft is experiencing one year in.) Which is pretty respectable. It’s the size of a fairly small country.

China has over twenty six million.

That’s not just statistically significant quote — it’s statistically overwhelming. Even when you factor in that the Chinese market is insular, and that the average user pays far less ($4-$6/monthly vs. approx. $20 in the West) clearly, Chinese online gaming has succeeded to a far greater extent than those of us in the West. Visitors to China report, in one memorable line, Why do we make fun of Asian MMO gamers, again? John Smedley’s keynote at last year’s AGC, distilled down into one sentence, was that ‘Asia is our future, and I’m going to bring it here.‘

Yet when you ask the average Western MMO player about China? “Oh yeah. The farmers.”

It’s a stereotype that refuses to go away. Many of the farmers are actually in places like Indonesia or Romania (Eastern Europe is the actual sweatshop of the gaming industry, apparently), or, in the dirty secret most MMO players know and are hesitant to acknowledge, simply Western players who decided to clean out their guild’s accounts.

Still, there’s a lot of farmers in MMOs that speak Chinese. Which makes a certain amount of sense, when you consider that there’s an awful lot of everyone else in MMOs that speak Chinese. Twenty six million of ‘em. Few of which actually play the same MMOs that we do — they’re too expensive, and few are localized in the Chinese language (WoW being the notable – and successful – exception). Instead they treat them as colonial beach heads, full of resources to harvest, while running roughshod over the natives who have some cultural objections to being treated as commodities.

Hmm. No, no parallels here at all, nope!

But the casual racism that erupts from this all is what bothers me, and I fear it’s a consequence of… well, vice.

You see, farmers don’t care about the world they parasitically draw sustenance from. They’re just there, looting and pillaging like any proper conquistador. The fact that their activities harm the game they draw life from, and could possibly harm it to the point of killing it (as could be argued is happening to Lineage 2 in the US) doesn’t phase them in the slightest. They’re just small fry in the food chain, after all. The suppliers. The real blame, if you could use the term in this context, really devolves to the dealers and the consumers. Which, dear reader, is you. Or someone you know.

And when you get this kind of rampant cultural imperialism, people tend to get irritated. We see it in Iraq. It’s little surprise we see it online as well, isn’t it? And much as the blunt instrument of American foreign policy results in anyone appearing vaguely Western being snatched off the streets of Baghdad and held for ransom, the typical MMO player generalizes the plague in their midst as being the enemy. And foreign. A dangerous combination indeed.

The answer? The same as any other drug problem. Dry up the market, and the “Chinese farmer” will return to pillaging other colonies. Games have to be either designed to be real-money-transaction resistant (liberal uses of instancing, a transparent economy that is in no way based on scarcity, and a design that makes the ingathering of wealth a function of casual gameplay which players in all tiers of skill can participate in) or simply support it up front and thus make the pimps that have used the gains of virtual vice to infest our community and purchase ‘respectability’ irrelevant.

Because it’s like any other drug problem. You can go beat up on Chinese farmers, or Colombian farmers, all you want. But really, in the end, you have to attack the supply line and reduce demand. And it’s not an easy task. The real world hasn’t managed yet.

But that’s the joy of MMOs – it’s a land of fantasy. And solving this problem is one fantasy I still cling to.