(John Smedley - stationblog) - RMT – What it is now, and what it can become! - Wed, 0

Today we released a white paper that features a lot of very detailed information about our Station Exchange service for EverQuest II. It contains details like the amount of revenue we generated for a fixed period between 2005 and 2006. It can be found here.
Many people may wonder why we put out all of this very confidential information. The simple truth is that we wanted to shine the light of day on the real world economics at work here. I believe very strongly that RMT is an absolutely massive part of the MMO business. By our estimates, it’s over $1 billion worldwide in the past 12 months. A lot of this is coming from Korea and China, but probably 30% of it is coming from the US. Those are numbers that no one can ignore. It’s very easy to sit back and take the “no RMT” stance, and many companies have. I understand and respect that position. We all know farming is rampant in MMOs (yes, ours included), but there is a very concerted effort in most of the major MMOs to stop it. It absolutely negatively affects people’s gameplay. I’ve had that happen to me in my own gaming, and I get every bit as frustrated as many of you. We’ve all seen the spamming of some of these guys in our games, and yes… it sucks.
We took a different approach to this. 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%. Now I am NOT saying it doesn’t happen on the other servers (even though the companies that do this encourage people to break our EULA). It happens and it’s common. However the really serious problem cases are down by a significant amount because there is now a legitimate place to engage in this kind of practice.
This has provided us with a lot of information about the behavior involved with RMT and we think it best to share as much of this data as we can in an effort to get this all out in the open.
After having seen Station Exchange running for over a year now, I’ve come to see RMT in an entirely different light and I believe the real future of RMT is actually a really bright one if we can work on our game designs in such a way as to make it a cool part of the games. Imagine an MMO without a subscription fee that has Station Exchange built into it. However, the game is designed in such a way as to only allow the sale and transfer of non-game impacting items. What if an in-game tailor had the toolset to actually put cool designs on clothing and literally make them custom for different players, and then that person could open a virtual storefront on Station Exchange. That’s the kind of cool thing we see in the future and frankly it’s the direction we want to steer things. To create an ecosystem for players to make money from these games while they’re having fun.
Smed



Author: John Smedley
Visit This Blog Page...
Visit StationBlog