Anarchy Online: Item Sales Interview - RPG Vault

RPG Vault interviewed Anarchy Online's Game Director Craig Morrison who talked about Funcom's addition of item sales and the game's business model:

Jonric: When did you start to consider adding item sales? At that time, what potential obstacles did you see, and how did you end up addressing them?

Craig Morrison: We have been discussing the idea of micro-transactions and item sales for some time. It has been a dominant trend in the eastern MMO markets for a few years now, and was always going to become a factor for western audiences as well. I think the main pitfall we observed was that the latter had an inherent distrust of anything that allowed your progress in the game to be directly affected by your ability to purchase items, and I feel that still holds true. This guided how we thought about introducing item sales, and we quickly decided that if we were to proceed, we would have to be inventive and find ways to introduce the model so the items were still attractive while not directly influencing people's actual ability to progress.

Luckily, Anarchy Online has very strong social aspects, and related items that don't necessarily have any impact on the play have always been popular as collectibles in the game. This allowed us to target this area, and to build some interesting and really cool items that players can now purchase with the new paid points system.

Read the full interview on RPG Vault.