GameCyte

“I don’t seem to be having any fun. Maybe I need to be paying more.”

It’s difficult to imagine a player saying these words about a game. Yet, there is an entire business model that centers around providing this precise benefit to players — most frequently, of MMORPGs and other games whose balance centers on levels or items. The practice is known as “real-money trading” or “real-money transactions,” and whether prohibited by the game’s publishers or supported by them, it typically translates to an exchange of actual, real-world cash for in-game goods and services. For a fistful of dollars, any player with a valid credit card can make the jump to level 70, and find themselves outfitted with all the gold and +2 maces they can carry, without having to grind or hunt or consult hundred-page FAQs. Thousands of enterprising gold farmers are willing to catass so that you don’t have to, opening the ranks of the elite to anyone who can afford it, and allowing players who might not otherwise be able to dedicate the necessary time to see the promised land of milk and honey endgame content.

From a business standpoint, subsidizing RMT is a fantastic move. If there are players out there who are willing to put more money into your game beyond the existing fees, you’d be a fool not to let them. From a design standpoint, however, RMT is a treacherous path to walk. At best, it raises questions about a plutocratic player population, allowing for arguments and accusations between top players of skills vs. bills. At worst, it strikes one as greedy — attempting to cash in on the worst-designed portions of a game by hoping to charge players a fee in order to skip it. To me, the entire thing just tends to warn me away from a game entirely. If there is a significant population who will pay extra money for the privilege to not play through a large part of your game, maybe your game isn’t very fun.

This may sometimes also include “microtransactions,” the hallmark of the free-to-play (F2P) revenue model. In these games, RMT is the lifeblood of the business plan, without which it cannot exist; the game itself is offered free of charge, and players are offered “premium” content on an a la carte, pay-per-feature basis. Granted, the questions of game balance and cash-versus-merit still arrive, but they tend to be slightly less of an issue due to the fact that they are usually planned for — and designed for — from the very beginning. The truly problematic RMT, to me, are not these types, but the kind that occur in titles for which one has already paid the premium fee — be it through a traditional retail purchase, a subscription charge, or both — yet there is an encouragement to pay even more in order to experience less.

The argument which is frequently made in favor of this type of RMT is that it provides greater accessibility to players who cannot dedicate dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to advancing their characters and/or hunting down rare items, but would still like to play on equal footing with their peers, or experience the endgame content. The example we’re all thinking of is World of Warcraft at this point, so let’s use it to hypothesize: Let’s say, on the recommendation of my friends, I decide to finally experience the worldwide gaming sensation for myself, and pick up a copy of WoW. Unfortunately, my friends are all level 50 or higher, and there’s precious little we can do in the game together apart from chatting; any monsters who will be an appropriate challenge to my newbie character are beyond pathetic to my overpowered friends, and any quests they might be on would kill me in a heartbeat. In order for us to start questing together, we are left with two options: My friends can all create new characters in order to play with me, abandoning their current pursuits and any in-game groups they may have been trying to stay on par with (or else double their existing game commitments in order to keep pace with their new and old characters). Or, I can devote dozens upon dozens of hours to playing without my friends in order to try and catch up to their levels, during which time they aren’t likely to stop playing themselves — thus keeping my goal that much further out of reach unless I devote even more time than they do. If I happen to have other time commitments (a job, a family, oboe lessons, etc.), option two becomes unfeasible, and if my friends have other commitments, option one becomes unattractive.

This is where option three comes in: I can pay $50-100 or so to some folks who will dedicate themselves to my character around the clock, grinding relentlessly until my character is on even footing with that of my peers a mere week or two later. Assuming I find a reputable power-leveller who has not just scammed me out of my social security number (seeing as such services are officially prohibited by Blizzard, thus relegating them to the grey market), this is starting to seem like an attractive solution to the problem. In practice, however, it raises a whole host of issues. If one assumes that the portion of the game I have now paid someone else to play was an enjoyable experience, I have now doubled the cost of my game, yet only received half the value. There is nothing stopping me from starting a new character later and playing that portion of the game myself at a later time, but the fact that I was forced to find a way around it in order to play with the players of my choice exposes a massive flaw in the game’s design. To top it all off, despite having a level 50 character to now play with, chances are good I’m still going to be playing like a newbie. After all, it hasn’t been me playing for those hundreds of hours, it’s been a team of experts. By pawning off the job of gaining experience for my character, I have, appropriately enough, failed to get the necessary experience — and my first foray into a level 50 dungeon is sure to reflect that as I weigh the group down with slow decisions and confusion about my abilities. All of these issues point to one burning question: If I would rather pay an additional fee rather than play the game myself, how can this be “fun?”

I can go into a number of examples where the aforementioned level-disparity design problem is solved by other games, but lest this devolve into a diatribe about World of Warcraft, let’s return to the issue of RMT. WoW can’t really be blamed for the RMT solution; as mentioned, Blizzard explicitly prohibits gold farming and leveling services within their game, and does its best to enforce this rule. Nor is the grey-market RMT phenomenon unique in any way to WoW; it’s simply the most prominent as a side effect of the game’s massive population and popularity. The problem lies in the fact that developers, having seen players’ willingness to pay top dollar for a “Get Out of Grind Free” card, are now experimenting with designing their games to encourage this concept. Entire companies have popped up, subsidized by game publishers, whose sole business is facilitating item sales between players in MMOs. Sony Online Entertainment has just announced its intention to include RMT facilitation inside its upcoming titles, and there are already systems in place for EverQuest II. Instead of claiming RMT doesn’t unbalance a game and place the power in the hands of the rich kids, developers are hanging up a new sign that says “Rich Kids Welcome” and encouraging players to circumvent the bulk of their game content — which therefore removes all incentive to make that content enjoyable to play in any way. If people play through it on their own, after all, there’ll be no need to pay for the shortcut.

If your game doesn’t happen to be an MMO, don’t worry — there are still plenty of ways to get paid twice for the same amount of content. In 2006, the later-cancelled Gran Turismo HD was poised to take the series’ usual feast of content and turn it into a famine; the usual lineup of cars and tracks, available in previous games for the purchase price, would now be available only through microtransactions. The same amount of content, which had sold for $60 or so, would now cost over $400 for the full list. Battlefield: Bad Company had an aborted fling with premium DLC, where top weapons would only have been available at extra cost, which was later altered to provide the weapons free with a time commitment — though will still let players skip the grind for forking over a little more cash. Beautiful Katamari and NHL 2K8 were both dinged last year for their DLC offerings, as well: DLC can be a terrific way to add value to a game, but both of the aforementioned titles were caught charging players to unlock content which was clearly already on the game disc — content, logically, which players should already have had access to for the original purchase price. This type of offense is far worse: More than simply designing a lousy game and charging players to skip it, this is content you should have access to, but not even a time commitment will allow you to reach it. The developers are now removing parts of your game and, in essence, holding them for ransom.

Raph Koster, on his blog, puts the problem thus:

My bottom-line: expect more ancillary services to come over time, and they are going to be for, well, whatever. Everything. Expect there to be services to allow you to maintain a presence without actually playing. Mercenaries for hire for raids. House decorators. Whatever. And these services will likely be in aggregate a greater revenue source than the actual world operation is.

Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly.

But a heck of a lot of them will pay up quietly.

Not me, Raph. Even a DVD-style menu which allows you to skip ahead in the game — even for free — strikes me as fundamentally flawed. If you feel that there’s a part of your game I will be so uninspired by that you feel I may need to avoid it entirely, then don’t put that part in the game. Unless I’m reviewing something, I play a game to enjoy myself. I don’t see the need to waste any portion of my time with a game that can’t provide that consisently.

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