Some of you may know of LOGIN.  It is the Seattle based online game development conference.  There is some confusion surrounding this conference because it was sued out of its last two names: OGDC and Ion (if someone sued them out of Ion I don¡¯t know how they think they¡¯re getting away with LOGIN). 

Anyway it¡¯s a fantastic conference if you are building massive games.  eq2 plat If you¡¯re reading this from Seattle I urge you to come.

Anyway, now back to my favorite topic, me. 

I¡¯ll be speaking at this year¡¯s LOGIN on the topic of monetization in MMOs.  BOOOOORING.  I know.  But I¡¯m going to spice it up a bit by talking about how design interacts with monetization.   Anyway I thought I¡¯d throw my thoughts at you, my dear, attentive, and largely silent sounding board, before I go and do the real thing.

Types of Monetization:

Everyone knows about subscriptions based games and microtransaction based games but there are so many more ways to charge out there! (See how exciting this is when I put exclamation points after stuff¡­)

In my talk I plan to go over ¡°box product only¡± massive games such as Guild Wars or Diablo 2 (though we can debate about the ¡°massiveness¡± of Diablo all day long), subscription based games such as WoW or Everquest, micro games such as Maple Story, ¡°new-micro¡± games such as Combat Arms (which uses a ¡®rental¡¯ model) and ZT Online (which uses a ¡°please spend your retirement money at the casino¡± model), RMT games such as Entropia Universe (which uses the ¡°The Swedish Finance Supervisory recognizes us a f¡¯kin¡¯eq2 plat  bank motherf¡¯kers¡± model¡­[which is substantially less effective with less swearing]) as well as some of the emerging models such as the rise of the online arcade

(I¡¯d define this one, but that would just make it harder to point to it at some juncture in the indefinite future when someone does some brilliant and totally arbitrary thing, and say, ¡°Called it!¡± while gesticulating wildly).