Sir Frank Sends Chris Spears Big Bag of Poop

Sony Online at the start of the year introduced an item shop pushing micro-transactions into all their games - including venerable subscription-based games such as Everquest and Everquest 2. Blizzard continued a trend of picking off the stray nickel at the edges, adding more and more “value added” services such as race change surgery and finally, just adding their own pet mall. And in what may be the most egregious example of holding paying users upside down and shaking them until quarters came out, Champions Online started selling full skill “respecs” for $12.50, after insisting that adding them to the game was a bad idea.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m all for game developers making money. I mean, I’m a game developer, and I like money. But treating players -- paying customers -- as an endlessly renewable resource to be mined for candy is not only ethically suspicious, it’s counter-productive. Because in today’s economy the pocketbooks of your customers are as tight as yours are, the last thing they’re going to want to do is shell out $20 for a shiny +12 suit of Extra Special Value Chain Mail, and if you design your game so that +12 Value Chain Mail is necessary, your users will inform you that no, it’s not necessary because your game is not necessary.

First of all, no harm, no foul. The mount is purely cosmetic and spending those $25 doesn’t give any advantage within the game. Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings claims that the horse blurs the line between purely cosmetic items and buying in-game power but I really can’t see any advantage whatsoever to having the mount.