So the announcement that in Diablo III players will be able to buy any item in the game from other players for either in-game currency or real money caused some heads to explode and people to discuss the evil of "pay to win". Apparently nobody noticed, or at least chose to keep mum about, the fact that this is exactly like EVE Online. And the EVE fans have claimed for years that this isn't evil RMT, because you buy the items from other players, not from the game company. As usual MMO commentary is highly tribal, thus if one person's favorite game company does something it is a force of good, while if another game company does exactly the same it is a force of evil.

Nevertheless I find the system in Diablo III interesting, because it is safe to assume that a lot more people will play Diablo III than EVE. The more people participate in a market, the closer the actual prices on the market reflect what could be called the "true value". And I think this true value will be an eye-opener. And that is a good thing.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

In 2007, the AVEA project proposal called for a new research effort into "so-called virtual property, artificially scarce digital objects that have rapidly become a viable business model for software products and online services." Gold farmers and real-money traders in massively-multiplayer online games had recently broken into popular consciousness. There was an expectation that virtual economies were going to continue to expand in one way or the other. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Finnish interactive media industry had already had a good start in grasping the phenomenon thanks to some successful early ventures and research projects. Now was a time to push on and take part in creating the next wave of the phenomenon.

This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.

Virtual Economy Research Network (VERN) is a communication hub for scholars, students and developers interested in virtual goods, currencies and economies. It was launched in September 2006 and is maintained by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

VERN's purpose is to promote academic research in the area, serve as a research resource, and enhance communication between scholars and developers. The main features of the site are a blog, a discussion forum, a bibliography and a list of research links.