Amber Night (rebooted)

It's about the economy, stupid.

Shit, I really thought I was going to beat Scott out on a really juicy RMT article for once, but damn he moves fast for an old fart. (Actually it's because I've been mesmerized with my cartoon alter-ego all day.  I'm like that.  Also, you can expect Scott's inevitable analysis to be much more…um, what's the word…intelligible.)

It's been a year, I guess, and Sony wants you to know that Station Exchange has been greeted with flowers and candy.  From their white paper Station Exchange: Year One: (MS Word warning)

As SOE continues to develop new and innovative massively multiplayer online gaming experiences, the lessons learned from Station Exchange will be applied. Since the income generated from auctions is predictable, and can be controlled, it may offer new ways to monetize game play. It is already clear that the possibility exists of creating an MMO in which the virtual economy is a core component. This would not work for all game types. But in the cases where it does work, would provide a powerful way to keep subscribers glued to the game.

(Original Gamasutra article here.) 

21 pages of analysis should, of course, be subjected to a rigorous scholastic parsing, and yet I just can't be bothered.  So instead, please partake of, and enjoy, the common rantus bloga.

Now it's no secret that while MMO publishers will tell you to your face that it's all about providing an enjoyable, immersive experience, we know that it's really all about providing an experience that will keep you coming back month after month.  As it turns out, the key to doing that is to let your players have fun.  That's why you're not playing World of Turbotax.  So perhaps Sony should be lauded for peeling back the veneer and just saying what they really mean: Glue the players down so we can monetize them.  Brutally honest stuff.  Thanks for that I guess.

But this is the bullet point that completely blew me away:

Station Exchange is not an extension of game play. It is a utility. It offers a fundamentally different approach to play: a means of skipping the boring parts.

I'm not a game designer, so maybe I lack some subtle bit of arcana that makes this make sense.  Perhaps seasoned game designers, sitting in their oak paneled rooms with overstuffed chairs, drinking their port and smoking their parejo's will knowingly tut-tut as they read this uninformed opinion, and yet it seems to this Eliza that the rine is not falling entirely on the goddamned pline in this particular case.  Because under this new para-dij'em, Sony proposes an end-run around traditional game design concepts such as "make the game fun to play, mmkay?" and replaces it with an incredibly new concept: "If our game bores you, you can pay money to skip it."

Bold move, Sony.  Bold move. 

UPDATE:

I'd just like to point out this paragraph in the white paper:

Even so, Station Exchange has had little if any effect on the popularity of trading EverQuest II goods through third party auction houses.

Which is interesting, because over at Station Blog , John Smedley claims

… We decided that in EQ II we were going to open Station Exchange servers and allow this activity specifically on those servers. Since that time, we have seen a tangible reduction of RMT on our other servers and specifically we’ve seen it go from roughly 40% of our CS ticket volume to roughly 10%.

(Emphasis mine.) 

Huh.

§ 

Related Posts

1. In which I crush misguided game designer’s dreams of teh fat lewt
2. 29 Days Later
3. Everquest Rebooted
4. I Control The Sun
5. Do Ogres even talk like that?