Great article (http://www.lzimm.com/nov2009/purpose.html), too!
Anyways, I'm kinda stuck on what I can tell you.
I basically built a bit of infrastructure shit that let us build all the pricing and billing logic at scale. So my role was more "low level" than what went on with the actual transaction processing, which I think was pretty typical. That said though, I'm sure that's not your question, which is more resolved around the economics at large, so even though I'm probably not supposed to talk about this, I don't really care:
- the entire gaming industry is struggling to make money in new ways (ie: piracy blah blah blah). - one way to do it is subscriptions (ala WoW), but i think most the big publishers are finding that its pretty hard to actually do that successfully (WoW is a pretty rare phenomenon) - the other big way to do that (online, at least) is the whole free-to-play thing, where you make money by letting people buy virtual goods and crap (ala all the facebook crap) - the thing is, when you get into games that people take seriously, you have to be careful about the goods you let people buy, because all of that shit can really change game mechanics, so you have to either: restrict yourself to selling things that don't mean anything, like avatars and crap; be very careful that if you do sell items that affect gameplay, not to build strange new equilibria, or more importantly, prematurely alienate players before you get to those equilibria in the first place; or (taking the approach that we were taking.. i think anyways, i got pretty fed up at this point because it seemed like they kept focussing on incredibly moot details), make it so that you can't buy an advantage that you can't get by just playing the game (ie: only letting people buy items that you can get through random item drops that reward gameplay as opposed to debits from your bank account)
i have no idea why i did that in bullet points.
furthermore, i have an incredibly bad sense of grammar right now, so i'm not sure if that even made any sense. drop me an email if you wanna chat more :)
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edit: uhhg, i have to admit, this reply seems terribly uninsightful, sorry :(