I find security issues facing games pretty interesting; PlayNoEvil is one of my favourite spots for discussion about security related issues. Gamasutra sat down with Gene Hoffman, CEO of Vindicia, a billing and fraud management company, about the issues facing MMOs and ways to mitigate those issues. Of particular concern are the RMT resale markets (if it exists), and chargebacks. And what of the mingling of real and virtual economies? Hoffman has this to say:

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The development talent at Blizzard now has a new publisher and parent in Activision Blizzard. If you ask the developers, they're enthusiastic about the change. "All game development is still completely within our Irvine headquarters", World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan told Kotaku during our sit-down today. "There's no outside influence at all in the development of Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 or WoW".

In fact, Blizzard sees an upside to being hitched to the Activision star. "They have a lot of expertise in the console area, where we're very-headed in addition to PC and online", Kaplan said.

"Activision's point of view is, there's a lot of trust in Blizzard and what we do. Activision's just trying to figure out how we work and try to learn from us".

But Activision's an ambitious company. CEO Bobby Kotick has talked in the past about monetizing massively multiplayer environments, competing with iTunes, even evolving pricing models for consoles. Does Activision have the power to change the way Blizzard monetizes WoW, if it wants to?

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More free games will help the MMORPG market expand, found a Parks Associates study. Apparently, only "hardcore" gamers, who represent only a small portion of the audience surveyed, are willing to pay subscription fees, and so for everyone else, the study recommends offering more free titles.

Out of some 2000 online gamers surveyed, Parks said, 14 percent would be interested in playing more MMORPGs if they were free. According to Worlds in Motion, Parks Associates' Michael Cai said that the excess of 10 million players WoW's scored is a major exception that most publishers shouldn't expect to emulate using a subscription business model.

"Social, dormant, and leisure gamers all show significant interest in a free-to-play, microtransaction-based model", said the study.

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It's currently popular to theorise that nearly all gaming will end up free or nearly free at some point, distributed via browser and monetized through ad support, microtransactions or scalable subscription models. Faith in this business model's been instated by the early success of many free-to-play web-based MMOs (many of them for kids, mind).

But what about the arguable king of all MMOs, World of Warcraft? Will it ever get on the trendwagon and go free, or offer a free option, at least? Not so much, says Blizzard COO Paul Sams, as part of an in-depth Gamasutra interview:

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Last month Sony Online Entertainment announced that upcoming titles The Agency and Free Realms would be utilizing the Live Gamer service for real money transactions, which many people took to mean that players would be able to buy weapons and equipment to enchance their gameplay. In an interview published over at Eurogamer, lead designer Hal Milton explains that this isn't the case at all.

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Micro-transactions aren't the future, they're the now. While companies like EA are totally on board with nickel and diming players for added content, some companies aren't. Take, Valve for instance. It hasn't gone micro-transactional. But would it? Let's hear what Valve's Dough Lombardi has to say:

If we ever get a game that fits that, we'd love to do that. I'd love to have a game that we gave away saying 'however much you want to invest in this, this is yours'.

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Word from the Battlefield: Bad Company beta test is that several weapons in the game's arsenal are locked, with "Available for purchase on Xbox Live Marketplace" notations next to them. In total 10 weapons are listed as for sale, with five of them also available in the Gold Edition of the game. What this basically means is that people willing to drop a little extra cash, be it in the store or on Xbox Live, will have more weapons to choose from than someone who scrapes together just enough to pick up the game itself. This is not the way microtransactions should be used. Cosmetic additions and extra maps are all well and good, but allowing players to pay in order to get a leg up on the competition is just slimy. Multiplayer games suffer from enough balance issues without this sort of thing going on. Where will this lead? Perhaps eventually they'll allow you to purchase a much better surrogate player to represent you in matches, taking the term "professional gaming" to an all new level. Maybe we can pay for ammo next! "Everybody down! He bought extra clips!" *sigh*

EA charging for weapons in Bad Company Beta [Xbox 360 Fanboy]

What do you get when you put Everquest II producer John Blakely, Matt Firor of ZeniMax Online Studios, Mark Jacobs of EA Mythic, Raph Coster of Areae, and GoPets CEO Erik Bethke into one room to discuss opportunities for increasing revenue and reaching new players in the MMO space? From what I saw this afternoon, you get a debate over microtransactions versus traditional subscription payment systems. I attended a panel called "Where are the Biggest Online Gaming Opportunities?" which was supposed to about experimenting with new MMO design and innovative new revenue models, but it quickly became a debate of old school MMO systems versus the new ones. The subject of microtransactions has popped up a lot this week, most notably in the Dave Perry Q&A from earlier in the day, where Perry sings the praises of the ad-supported, microtransaction funded business model.

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