SubscribeThe Station Exchange White Paper
February 7, 2007 12:08 pm
After a year of the Station Exchange, Sony released a white paper to tell everyone how much money they made. Here’s the actual .doc. (Warning: really awful 3D charts!)
There’s a brief section on differences in play patterns between Exchange servers and regular servers. Characters on the Exchange servers tend to have more money.
One result of the easy availability of money on The Bazaar is that players own more in general. The broker board on The Bazaar shows double the number of sales for house items and triple the number of sales for house pets. Perhaps players on The Bazaar have more cash, but nothing much to spend it on.
Huh.
The author also discusses race and class distribution in sales, but doesn’t say if they adhere to actual play distribution. The designers should be keeping an eye on play distribution, looking for balance issues; I wonder if Exchange data is more helpful. When the author says “warriors, summoners, rogues, druids, clerics and brawlers are among the classes sold just once,” I, as a designer, would be thinking there’s a problem. (I’m just talking; I’m not familiar with EQ2’s class balance issues.)
Sony collects a flat listing fee of $10 for characters, and when the character sells, they collect an additional 10% of the final price. The author is proud to point out that characters are worth a lot of money. “Of the top 20 auctions of characters, none was for less than $1,000. The top four character auctions were worth $2,000 each.”
One of the author’s final conclusions:
Station Exchange is not an extension of game play. It is a utility. It offers a fundamentally different approach to play: a means of skipping the boring parts.
That’s the most interesting part of the whole paper. He’s admitting that they have a financial incentive to create a boring game, and that’s horrifying.
