This post was originally published on my gaming blog, reroller. I’m re-posting it here because it’s also community-related and general enough to post here.

Microtransactions. There, I said it. A dirty word to some in the gaming industry. Or maybe just misunderstood and poorly implemented?

There’s a commonly-shared belief in the gaming marketplace that games with no monthly fee that are microtransaction-supported are unpalatable to the “serious” MMO gamer. Microtransactions, which offer an alternate (or additional) form of payment to the traditional subscription model, have been looked down upon for a long time, the general sentiment being that they encourage spammers, gold farming and sales, real-money trading (RMT), and pretty much every negative activity in the MMO book.

Now, I’ve written about microtransactions and real-money trading in MMOs before, but from a different vantage point. This time around, I’d like to explore a couple of options that I see as viable ways to monetize an MMO with microtransactions (and in turn, dropping costly subscription fees) in a way that doesn’t anger the majority of the player base and get a rise out of half the gaming bloggers out there. Obviously, this has been expounded upon by any number of gaming industry professionals and many people much smarter than myself, but I figured I’d take a stab at the concept coming from a the perspective of someone who develops web-based communities, as opposed to coming from a game developer’s mindset.

Challenging the misconceptions

The way I see it, MMOs are at their core simply online communities like any other format, be they social networks, message forums, etc. They engage and involve the user to an extraordinary extent, and provide a much richer user experience and interface, but they function based on the same principles that power most communities. And there are a few things you can do to encourage good (and bad) behaviour in most online communities.

The problem with the way microtransactions have been implemented in online games to date is two-pronged:

1. They remove the barrier to entry to the game, introducing undesirable users into the game. These users would then spoil the community via abuse of the system like gold sales, spamming, etc., encouraging negative behaviour in the process.
2. They alienate the actual gamers themselves by preventing them from growing their characters without spending money.

I’d argue that most or all of the worries people have about microtransactions are either unfounded or based on discrete examples of how they’ve been integrated into games in the past. MMOs have evolved, so why can’t the way payment is handled evolve along with them?

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