MMORPG as theme park?

January 29th, 2008 Jun Sok Huhh Posted in news |

Today, Game Rating Board of Korea approved mini-games in MMORPG Lohan. The rating on them had been denied for its speculative nature. It sounds strange, but in Korea, the criteria that rating agency does much importance on are difference between gaming and gambling. The serving firm of Lohan made up for some ambiguous parts about in-game currency charging with respect to mini-game, and got a final admission of Rating Board.

It is interesting that Lohan is one of typical MMORPG based on fixed fee. But, as you already knew, there have been a lot of mini-games in MMORPGs. Part of them was invented unofficially by players, others were provided by developers to give small fun for players. In case of Lohan, they benefited unexpectedly from a mini-game, that was a Baccarat in reality (See this). It made a huge surge in players' activities and RMT, which was finally a helping hand for firm’s revenue. Lessons from this experience might be more profound than we think. This time, they intend to make players to charge more in-game currency in micro-payment fashion.

Anyway, recent rush to micro-payment also gives some inspiration to traditional MMORPGs. Like this case of Lohan, games in game may make a way to charge players additionally besides fixed fee. Actually, this type of pricing scheme is originally from theme park business. Under some assumptions, two-part tariff that consists of entry fee and price by usage enables the firm to extract more surpluses from consumers, and results in higher profits. In Korea, a mini-game of Lineage, dog race, has been popular contents among players. Weirdly some do heavy buying from RMT for this petite thing. Especially, in Korea, gamble-related mini-games tend to be pretty popular. In extreme case, MMORPG might serve as a platform for virtual gambling.