Boing boing said our RMT talk was creepy!

Hey how cool is it when Cory Doctorow says your talk is ... creepy at GDC?

www.boingboing.net/2009/03/24/real-money-trading-g.html

It generated some good comment flow over there. Much of it the normal gut reaction against RMT or item-based business models, that is common in the game design community and the digerati - but not so much in the actual players of online games.

Ironically, they way that you find out f you are providing value to players is when the value present is strong enough to actually support a secondary market. Free to play, item-based and RMT design in particular forces the designer to work the hardest to create system designs that work cleanly and solidly across all the major vectors: social, gameplay, simulation, monetization and markerting models.

Earlier this month virtual goods news carried a much more in-depth interview on the work LiveGamer and GoPets have done to integrate their RMT and auction system into GoPets: www.virtualgoodsnews.com/2009/03/live-gamer-and-gopets-on-the-importance-of-training-users-for-marketplaces.html

Massively did a really nice long review of our talk: www.massively.com/2009/03/28/gdc09-applied-rmt-design-with-gopets-and-live-gamer/ It looks like they really went to town in checking out our wiki and found lots of the cool limited edition huggable kitties that we have to illustrate the article.

Gamasutra also made a transcript: www.gamasutra.com/blogs/OlivierLejade/20090326/997/GDC_09_Applied_RMT_Design.php I still get goosebumps when I think that gamasutra picked the AGC 2007 panel on RMT where I debated Marc Jacobs with Raph Koster and we go into Gamasutra's Best of 2007: Top 5 Most Significant Moments in MMOs! www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16758

Just a quick notice at Lightspeed - but I will plug the blog anyways because it is a cool blog: lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/erik-bethke-on-game-balance-in-free-to-play-games/

-Erik

Originally posted on LiveJournal