Brilliant ideas too. I would also surmise that asynchronous collaborative building/crafting will be huge, whatever the genre.

My knowledge of game development and marketing is very limited but I am a long time game playing customer. I am still trying to work out what impact the apparently unstoppable rise of micro-transactions is going to have on my hobby from a customer’s perspective.

I can see several good things about micro-transactions: They offer a business model that allows smaller companies to compete with the industry giants which increases the choice and variety of games on offer. In theory free to play with micro-transaction offers the customer all the choice. Customers can sample a wide variety of games at little or no cost and once they choose to play a game they can pay as much or as little as they like.

Unfortunately the reality in many cases does not seem to be as customer friendly. My two biggest concerns are i) The impact on game design (games will be designed as grind fests order to maximise item shop revenues rather than customer entertainment) and ii) Micro-transaction systems which are designed to squeeze excessive amounts of money from a small number of addicted customers. I call this “customer abuse”.

You mention four types of item commonly sold in an item shop:
1) Faster advancement, 2) tedium shortcuts, 3) appearance selection and 4) Item access.

To me 1) and 2) are almost always problematical. If a game is fun to play why would people want to pay to skip parts of it? There is a moral hazard here encouraging designers to design grind fests in order to encourage people to spend money to bypass the grind. As these items are usually consumables they are also a prime vehicle for customer abuse. We read about addicted customers spending hundreds of dollars a month in item shops and I imagine a good deal of this goes on pots and other consumables.

I don’t have a problem with 3) even though I think Blizzards $10 for a non combat pet is just bad value.

I have mixed views about 4). I don’t really have a problem with people paying for items but I can see dangers. If getting powerful items is one of the main objectives of the game then allowing people to buy powerful items for cash may be game breaking. One common form of customer abuse is to introduce a gambling system where you buy a box with an unknown item in it. It may be high quality or it may not. I have read of addicted players spending large sums opening such boxes in the hope of gettign a good item.

I am perhaps most surprised that you don’t mention a 5th item shop category: 5) pay for access to content. This is very unproblematic and in my mind provides the best deal for the customer – you buy the parts for the game you want to play. The incentive on developers is to make an interesting compelling game so that customers want to buy more of it.

I have recently broken my own micro-transaction taboo and have started playing Dungeons and Dragons online. I have even bought stuff in the item shop. I am happy enough with Turbines implementation because a lot of the item shop stuff is “pay for content” and I also think that the existence of a monthly subscription option limits the potential for customer abuse.

My question for the future is this: given the apparent inevitability of micro-transactions for everything will this mean a descent into grind-fest games surviving on the revenues from a small number of their most addicted customers or will market forces ensure that only interesting, fun to play games with non abusive item shops survive?

Puzzle Pirates has tinkered with subs and microtransaction/F2P for years now. To date, the microtransaction servers have been most profitable, but *both* actually are profitable. If nothing else, free players make it easier to keep critical mass.

WoW is a weird beastie in that it has a TON of inertia behind it, so when most players are at the level cap, it doesn’t kill the game. That sort of stratification and population grouping would kill a smaller game.

Even the small tinkering around the edges is a put off, I do think that WoW’s charging for server transfers has had an negative effect on server balances. And EQ2’s station cash is always going to make players wonder if without it the main game would have more variety in appearance items (strangely though the XP speedup potions on offer really don’t bother me).

A lot of people keep saying the subscription model is dead, personally I think the problem is more that the subscription market is heavily saturated. If every game closed down tomorrow so that we had an empty market I think you’d always be able to make more money then developing a subscription game then a free to play game.

While I like normal simpler games from small developers, I do desire and expect the next big MMO to be something huge, the original premise of EQ1 offering a whole world I think is still what motivates a lot of players like me, and looking at console game budgets I think we’ll see more big MMO’s to come in future.

WAR was probably for me the most extreme example since it actually had so much PVE content yet was obsoleted by the PVP at every step, well that and I felt that they automated what were already very linear quest mechanics (I thirst for a good old fashioned choice in a quest! there are a couple of real ones in EQ2, but for the most part it seems that the bean counters decide that content you don’t follow isn’t worth coding in).

Too many of these new MMO’s seem to have traded a well thought out storyline and end game for a couple of areas and some PVP, I’m not against PVP there, I think when having it does improve things but it should be only part of the end game.

The other thing most games seem to have ignored is the PVE+PVP type of gameplay, when one of the most popular battlegrounds in WoW (Alterac Valley) is PVE+PVP its odd that more companies haven’t taken this idea further, Aion says they have, it will be interesting to see what they have done with it when I can give it a honest go (I’m into EQ2 too much at the moment to be subjective about a new game).

Two of the games that go pretty much all the way with this PVP are Darkfall and Eve, while Darkfall is a fantasy MMO its actually a Fantasy FPS MMO so its not an easy one to directly compare. But with Eve I’m surprised that we’ve not see another company launch a credible competitor to the game, like EQ1 I think Eve’s success right now owes a lot to there being no one to compete with as much as the game itself.

If say David Braben came out with Elite the MMO which had a universe say with nano tech that has a game world without the heavy penalty of dying/losing a ship, would this theoretical MMO take a lot of Eve’s business?

For me I’m totally against buying power with real money, and so any money trading game is a no go, there are several personal reasons, while not an RPer it does break my immersion to know that XYZ item costs real money, and also that playing more costs me more.

In EQ2 (that I play) there is the station cash though, on one hand the fluff appearance items I’m ok with, I’d even buy some myself if I saw something I liked. But there are also pots that increase your XP gain for a set period, ridiculously expensive for the meagre benefit but in a perfect world I’d get rid of these.

Long term, even if a real money game had the same or lower cost as a subscription game, I’d be suspicious because of the way that RMT games encourage the developer to alter the game to increase revenue. In the case of EQ2 there is a risk that a decision will be made not to make XP gain easier when for gameplay reasons it makes sense since it could harm their RMT sales, in this case I’d expect the bulk of the subscriptions revenue to guide this decision, but its still there as a conflict of interest.

While in comparison subscription games encourage the developer to only do things to keep hold of the player, a subtle difference and one that long term I think will keep the big money coming from the subscription model because the games will be better quality.

Let me give you an example of such a game: WoW at the time of Naxx40.

The top raiders were raiding 6 days a week and long into the early hours each night. Consumables stacked so most of the bleeding edge raiders had a string of potion buffs as long as your arm. Moreover most bleeding edge guilds were on servers with a lot of other very competitive raiders and the zones that spawned needed herbs were heavily camped. Repair bills were very heavy and raids wiped all night long.

Even paying your repair bills required hours of farming let alone providing consumables.

For most people who were that into it the solution was to buy gold from gold farmers. Of course players who could play full time could herb all day and wipe all night.

For most players you simply couldn’t operate at that level unless you could play full time or were buying gold.

I just think it’s interesting that when people say I’d never play a game where rich people have an advantage they forget that WoW was like that. And of course there’s Eve and its plex system.

SWTOR appears to mainly be offering 8 quest lines that will be fun to play through once. Almost certainly it will be more fun to play solo than to group with people who Esc out of the dialogue you want to hear.

They are vague about end-game content. Possibly it will be surprisingly brilliant but I’m expecting something fairly wow-like (battlegrounds, solo mob grinding, raid dungeons etc).

If the main reason to play the game is to solo each class once will they be able to keep people?

Oddly I half-expect that they will for the same reasons WoW keeps people. People get in, get comfortable, have some status, have some friends and don’t want to hop to some other game where they’ll be a level 1 noob again.

It will be a very interesting test case for your theory.

The carebears occasionally lose a ship to creative gankers tricking them with game mechanics (beware wrecks floating in space labelled “Free stuff! Please take!”)

The pvpers lose a succession of ships based on what Kill Ten Rats described as an ante system. I can fly with a cheap Tech 1 Frigate and if it dies the insurance payout will just about cover the cost. It’s not a good ship and I probably will lose if solo but I can afford to risk these ships forever. More importantly any time I lose it’s because of the cheapness of the ship but any time I win its because of my awesome playing skills.

Alternatively I can fly an expensive ship that is quite likely to win but is a bigger hit to the wallet if I lose it. But that’s fun too and it allows people to have 10:1 kill ratios simply by spending game money. (A big part of this is the ability to legally buy game currency which is a big reason for Eve’s success).

But everyone loses ships all the time. In a sense Eve is a disguised permadeath system. You may think your character is the little face in the top corner that is infinitely clonable but actually your playing piece is your ship, not your character, and ships suffer permanent death.

Eve is a very clever game of smoke and mirrors. If I lose my ship I can find an excuse rather than face up to the cruel reality of “I’m maybe not all that good at this.” Fights are almost never even – variances in numbers, ship cost, and character age mean I can always find a justification why I lost that doesn’t include the demoralising issue of player skill.

I think Eve shows that games can run on players losing all the time provided you give them plenty of justification for believing “I would have won if the fight was fair….”