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.

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. “The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,” Srivastava says. “I thought, ‘This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.’”

On paper, it sounds like business suicide. Offer up the core of your gameworld and a wealth of its content for free, to anyone willing to give it a taste test. Its roots are in the ’90s, an extension of the razor blades business model, emerging in gaming from the need to combat piracy in certain territories. It found its way into the west most memorably in Jagex’s RuneScape, an MMORPG that launched, completely free for registrants, in 2001. Free-to-play is a draw for one big reason: the numbers add up.