MMOs, the Rant

Apparently, at the Austin Games Conference, having MMO makers rant has become somewhat of a tradition.  I'm not exactly an MMO fan.  MMOs are a fairly stale rut as far as American MMO production is concerned.  Here, take a bunch of spiffy weapons, spangly particle effect spewing spells and ugly monsters. Have at you. Expect to do banal, repetitive(putting it mildly) tasks to build up your time sink - excuse me, character - so they can get to a piece of the virtual world teeming with more beasts which have statistically insignificant chances of dropping Incredibly Shiny Stuff(tm.)

I cannot deny that World of Warcraft is a runaway financial success.  6 million people, all of whom are paying to play by the month and in some cases, by the hour.  Asian markets are often given a myriad of payment options for their MMOs.  The profit is enormous, but so are upkeep expenses.  Maintaining continuous development teams, vast arrays of servers and other equipment, etc. etc. etc.  Even then, the MMO rants make one thing blatantly clear.  There's a lot of of WoW Envy going on.

Should I somehow be thrown on an MMO project, I'd be more interested in developing a flexible platform which could be tweaked into several games, which I'd target at different audiences, mainly non-WoW players. I've tried to keep up with several online games; it's not very easy when I have a regular job, a court & science show addictions to feed as well.  Getting someone to play your game *and* WoW comes across as a rather fruitless venture.  I've had people turn down real life social gatherings for WoW raids. 

The other thing I find interesting is how resistant a lot of MMO devs can be to player behaviors.  Oh no, evil Chinese gold farmers are ruining economies.  Korean and Japanese online game publishers have for the most forgotten about beating these issues and are whole heartedly joining them. 
The game pubs are selling gold. They're selling swords. Why let some punk on eBay or Yahoo! Auctions earn mad profits selling virtual items when that money could be going into YOUR pocket instead?
Hell, I'd charge small amounts of money for premium services, extra avatar customizations and things that really didn't give the premium payers a tremendous edge over the freebies.  It's not like I've got a dongle that says "swipe credit card here to win battle!"

There are great, alternative revenue streams.  When most publishers are becoming increasingly conservative and thus quelching innovation, think outside of the retail package and monthly subscription for revenue.  A lot of the innovations of Asia are powered by easy, highly accessible microtransaction systems. Japanese people swipe their cell phones across bar-codes to buy things, subscribe to newsletters, you name it!  Koreans seem to have all manners of net-currency accounts easily rechargable offline as well as online.

I do recall in the 90s right before the Dot Com bust, there were companies offering Web Money serivces where you could pay offline to get money to securely spend online but they never really caught on. You couldn't use them in many places, unlike the Asian systems.  Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade are a good move in this direction and the Nintendo Wii will have a similar system set up.  Hopefully these systems will usher in an era of better gaming.