Add-On Profits

Until the past three or four years , most online games didn't really look at add-on revenue profits from alternative sources. Lately several games , among them EQ , Ultima Online ( UO ), and Dark Age of Camelot , have started to get into the merchandising of peripheral products, such as t-shirts and other clothing, jewelry , cups and glasses , figurines , collectible trading cards, fiction series books, and even paper and pencil versions of the online game. This can all add up to some nice incremental income to add to your margin, and you probably won't have to pay for the creation or production of the items. There are plenty of small merchandisers out there who will pay you a fee and royalties for the right to create and market these items to your customers.

One area of potential income that is currently the subject of controversy is the auctioning of player/characters and in-game items. If you've been paying attention for the past four or five years, you know that players have been using auction sites such as eBay to sell rare game items, in-game currency, and "buffed" characters to other players, sometimes for thousands of dollars. More than one small company has sprung up to do nothing but create and sell characters and items, and that is where the controversy comes in.

Most publishers don't want this activity in their games and don't support it. There are several reasons for this, all tied to CS and player relations resource expenditures:

• A significant number of individuals who auction game characters and items are scam artists . The seller advertises an inventory for a character and, when someone has paid the auction price and taken possession of the account, the buyer finds that the inventory doesn't match the auction notes. When this happens, the seller is usually not available, so the player complains to the publisher or developer. This consumes hours of CS resources that can be better spent elsewhere.

• Supporting such auctions by third parties, especially companies or individuals that do it as a business, tempts them into using bugs and exploits to grow characters more quickly, as seen recently by the Black Snow Interactive/Funcom AO controversy. This not only keeps your security and exploit team hopping , trying to keep up, but it also has the tendency to skew whatever economy exists in the game and to irritate and annoy players who legitimately build their characters and find they can't compete with the doctored ones. In a game that features some form of player vs. player (PvP) combat, this is a very serious issue.

• Most PWs have "spawn points," or areas where non-player characters (NPCs) and monsters that may carry rare items or necessary quest items regularly pop up after they are vanquished. As the creation timer on these spawns varies, sometimes being hours between spawns, players tend to "camp" on these spots, waiting for a spawn to occur. Companies making money off auctions tend to bring as many people as possible to camp and monopolize acquisition of these rare items, effectively locking out legitimate players from having a chance at a spawn. Many rare items are needed to advance in certain quests or complete armor or weapons sets, and if a player is blocked from getting them at the spawn points, he/she must either buy them or quit the game in disgust. This costs the publisher players and subscription fees.

The problem with just banning the activity and not supporting it is that it is unenforceable. If you drive the auctions off eBay or other large auction sites, the perpetrators will just set up their own site and the support calls will just continue. One way to have at least some control over the situation is to have your own auction site.

The advantage here is, as the publisher or developer with access to the source code, you can lock down accounts that put up an auction and display the contents for all potential buyers , assuring that auctions run from your site won't be stripped before transfer. This kind of security is good added value to players. You also can bill the buyer and subtract a fee from the sale price before transferring the rest to the seller, effectively making incremental income profit from the activity.

No publisher has yet done this, and there may be legal reasons not to get involved. You also have to consider the intangible effect on your customers, many of whom deplore the practice. However, it is an option for you to consider.