How Micro Transaction Affect the Virtual Game Society

Looking at this year's GDC sessions what impress people most? Everyone will tell you it's social games. When you search "social games" at the GDC website, you will find 115 sessions, 52 speakers and 16 exhibitors. All the phenomenon shows that social games is a huge success in last year. There are bunch of reasons makes social game so popular and everyone holds his/her own opinion, but how social games make money? For games on facebook, there's only one answer: Micro Transaction (MTX).

MTX are financial transactions involving very small sums of money. In game marketing, it means player spend small amounts of money, like 5 or 10 dollars, to buy some game points, and use these game points to trade for virtual items. These virtual items could make you level up faster, decorate your virtual represent - like avatar, home, etc - to make you more special . In a word, you can get some special things by paying and these stuff could not been achieved by normal playing. Because of MTX get very little money and the payback is obviously noticeable, it's a really easy decision for player to make.

For most of the social games, MTX mostly affect the game play positively. Because these kind of social games are casual and non-competitive, so player buy MTX items to improve their own avatar, decorate their own house/farm/restaurant and to send gift.

But considering a MMORPG(multi-player online role playing game), especially, a PVP(player VS player) MMORPG, what would happen when player could get MTX items. In MMORPG, the possible MTX item should have the following functions: 1) to help level up easily. 2) to be powerful weapon. 3) can provide special effect. But these items are really easy to ruin the balance of the game, destroy the fair game environment and ruin the virtual game society.

That doesn’t mean for MMORPG, MTX items could not survive in a fair game. Actually in Asia it’s almost a common sense that most online games are free to play, and players need to pay for the additional value of the game. But there’s several way to control the impact of the MTX items. For Maple Story as example, the MTX item is mostly like assistance: the pet which could help you pick up items; the shop allows you to trade with players; or ability to not lose experience points while being killed. So these kinds of items give players more convenience but for the really power and level of the character, it’s almost still the same. So even players without the items could still enjoy the game in full experience, just lack some level of the convenience.

That comes to the question “what would be the game moment that players are willing to take out their credit card?”, or “which kind of the MTX items are the one people would like to buy mostly?” In general, if a player is just a little bit far away from the point of “success” - the definition of the success could be reach another level, finish some epic building or finish one quest – player would be very glad to buy something just to reach the point. It also satisfied the desire to success without feel painful of the money. One other part is to “train player to be lazy”, game could design some small annoy tricks purposely, and player could use the MTX item to get convenience. Once the player’s get used to the item and don’t want to be bothered anymore, they would like to pay for keeping the convenience.

But there’s also some strange phenomenon which is worth to think about, and this question bothers me a long time. A huge successful MMORPG in China named “Long Journey”, announce itself as the game for “RMB players”. That means, the more money player paid in the game, the more fun and enjoyment he could get. Players who buy powerful weapon could easily kill the guy working hard to level up. Player also could pay to get some special right in the certain city. If he’s rich enough, he could become a land master and hire other players to work for him.

In that situation, the player who could afford the high spent in the game, we can consider him already a successful person in the real world. So what’s the motivation for him to make another similar success in game again? Is it really meaningful to map the real life into a virtual world?

To answer that question, maybe we need to think back to a basic question first - What is the biggest mental desire everyone has? The answer is the feeling of importance. A feeling of importance can be represented by a feeling of achievement, success, being listened to, opinions being appreciated by others. For those people who achieved success in real life usually have a stronger need to feel importance than others. So if they start playing game, they still could not give up this psychological desire, especially when they are aware of the other characters they meet in the virtual game world are real person. In that case they would really willing to pay “money”, what they already earned a lot, instead of “time/effort”, which they might be probably lack of, to defeat other player in some certain level. And, for those people who have a lot of time, they could play the game to earn money! What an attractive deal. So this situation explains why the game which leans so over to the MTX still makes a huge success and earns a lot.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy and self-supporting system. In long term, if the game fails to attract these rich people, it would lose the main incoming resource. And if the non-RMB players feel the world is too unfair to keep playing, they would also leave. So how to keep the satisfaction balance between the RMB and non-RMB player is another tough problem to think about.

In conclusion, MTX could only affect the casual social game in positive way, but it’s way more complicated in games contains competition and challenge. How to balance the impact of MTX items, how to make them really important to players so they would be willing to buy, but for those who just want to enjoy the “play” of the game, to try to keep them stay in the game without making them feeling unfair, is something critical to consider in designing the whole system.