Real Money Trade (RMT)

The MMORPG glossary is gaining one more acronym, RMT, for real money trade. This is the buying and selling of virtual items for real world dollars. Surprisingly the discussion stemming from SOE entering into the RMT market as broker hasn't ended, and the issue is still hotly debated in places like Terranova and Grimwell.com. Lots of people are predicting the end of the world, because RMT sullies the purity of virtual worlds, and would by that infection destroy them.

Now I'm certainly aware of the negative sides of RMT. And I probably have more experience in fully RMT enabled games than most people discussing them, because I played Magic the Gathering Online for years. In MtGO over the years I spent over $3,000 for virtual items, most of this going directly to the game company. And I didn't recuperate any of this money; I still own, no, make that "have usage rights of", my huge library of virtual cards. If I sold them in bulk, I wouldn't get much for them. If I sold them card by card, I could probably get most of my money back, but it would take me hundreds of hours, which I don't want to spend. So I'm waiting for MtGO v3.0 to come out end of 2005, which maybe improves the game enough for me to come back to it.

MtGO taught me two valuable lessons about RMT: a) It works. People are quite willing to spend a lot more than $15 per month on an online game. As long as the game is good, and they feel that the additional money is getting them some advantage in the game, they will buy. b) The problem with people selling virtual goods for money is often only a lack of transparency. The market area being rather chaotic, MtGO offers huge opportunies for profiteering by buying low and selling high, up to the point of scamming. If there was an auction house of FFXI / WoW style, where the current going rate for cards was clearly shown, there would be less problems.

For MMORPGs I don't see how they would be destroyed by RMT. First of all RMT isn't new, it just crawled out from below the rock it was hiding under before. All games lived with it perfectly well. Game companies have done some token efforts to ban a handful of players they caught on EBay. But they never dared to sue companies like IGE which quite openly sell virtual currency and items for all games. On MMORPG sites which have enabled Google ads, half of the ads are for such companies. So if RMT really destroyed games, the games would have gone under long ago.

The more likely prediction is that RMT will make MMORPGs more popular, not less. RMT already exists because there is demand from the players for it. It is hard to imagine a company going under because it fulfilled a demand from their customers, thereby taking away business from a black market. They just need to look at the example of MtGO and make the whole affair as transparent as possible, to avoid people "playing the system" to their financial advantage.

Some people are highly afraid that in the future game companies will sell you things directly, and not just brokering trade between players as the Sony Exchange does. They certainly will. Probably not virtual gold, although even that wouldn't make a difference; virtual gold is already created out of thin air by "farmers", and a programmer creating it wouldn't make a difference. But game companies will certainly try to sell you status objects, things that look good but have little or no effect of the virtual world. Actually I already bought one. And in WoW, no less. I paid $20 more for the collectors edition, so all my characters start with an extra non-combat pet, my choice of panda cub, mini diablo, or zergling. That certainly made some other players jealous, but I don't think they quit the game because of it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:09 PM Permanent Link