Raph has said that the overall theme of AGD was ‘change the world’. I think that shows his idealistic side. To me, the recurring theme seemed to be ‘how can we shake users for loose change?’ Runescape, Station Exchange, and Real Money Trades came up very frequently, to the point I was tired of hearing it by the end of the first day.

I understand there was a heated exchange between Ted Castranova of Terranova and Steve Salyer of IGE on their panel, with Ted saying “I’ll stop interrupting you once you say something truthful.” Unfortunately, I got in the room right after that exchange so I missed it, and can only relate it anecdotally. On that panel, a Sony representative said that they were spurred by the decision to do SOEbay by the fact that 40% of their service calls were related to dealing with potential RMT fraud. Smedley in his talk says that we can expect to see Sony try to make a game where RMTs are much more central to the game experience in the future.

As mercenary as the talk started to feel after a while, you can also tell that a lot of the talk comes from fear. Budgets are 30-50 million now, and they’re probably going to keep going up. But unless we’re willing to believe that WoW has totally opened the floodgates, the number of people buying them isn’t keeping pace, which is making the margins tighter. On the flip side, though, there’s a mental barrier attached to subscriptions that will probably keep them from going too much higher (I actually think retention of most games would benefit by going below the $10 dollar barrier again). So the money has to come from somewhere.

The best talk on the subject was Erik Bethke’s talk, although I had to miss what I hear was an excellent rant to go see it. Erik runs GoPets, a game which is funding by selling in-game cash out-of game, that players can then use to buy new pets and toys for their pets. He claims the model is very successful for them. In fact, he says that people routinely buy a ‘year’s worth’ of in-game gold for about a hundred bucks, and then blow through that cash in about 72 hours. Given my current MTGO play styles, I believe it.

The thing that seperated Erik’s talk, though, was he spent some time focusing on how to make the customers feel good about spending the extra cash. Which is, in my mind, crucial. Players don’t mind spending extra cash for their hobbies, but there’s still a value proposition at work. If they feel they’re being fleeced, they’ll walk.

One key thing that someone said somewhere that made me think (I think it was either Robert Garriott or Jeff Anderson) was that “In terms of subscription fees, we think people are paying for service, but the customers think they’re paying for content.” This may make me have to go rethink some things.