Real Money Trading game design, my notes from today's Game Developers' Conference

By Cory Doctorow at 6:25 pm Tuesday, Mar 24

One of the most interesting -- if sometimes creepy -- talks that I sat in on today at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco was "Applied Real Money Trade Design," with Eric Bethke of GoPets (a kid-oriented virtual world with a active market for buying and selling virtual goods) and Andy Schneider of Live Gamer (which runs the marketplace in GoPets). I took a bunch of notes -- this is thought-provoking and odd stuff that crosses the boundaries of fairness, economics, play and work.

Balancing methods: How can you screw up?

* You can't get this right a priori

   * You need to iterate

* Free to play isn't a business model, it's a name for thousands of business models

* Things that are defensive in nature can be charged for, and the time-rich skilled players won't resent lamers having more health or a shorter corpse-run, because they'll still kill 'em

   * But give the lamers big weapons and it amounts to an "I win" item -- instead, sell things like awesome looking weapons <

* Rental is awesome -- an item that's too powerful disappears from the game when the rental period expires

* Limited edition items -- they're scarce, you unbalance the game for 2-3% of the players

   * If it's really bad, you can buy them back

  * But it's a bad habit to get your users into

* Every couple months, come up with a whole new roster of items that are 10% more powerful than all the previous items; the inflation washes away all your past sins and your players are happy to spend all their time grinding those new items