Real Money games.

I tried out some Entropia, to learn a bit about how it worked, and test how feasible money making is in that game. The game does not appear to follow standard MMO structure. Instead, it appears to follow classic Casino rules. The basic gameplay is essentially a bunch of slot machines. You put money in, and hope to get some back. As far as I can tell, the fundamental constriction on the game's balance of resources, is the simple fact that anything can be sold back to the makers of the game for PED (the in game currency) which has a fixed exchange rate with US$. Due to this, they must carefully control the cost of acquiring loot, and the value of said loot to ensure you can never get more than you spend.

Personally, I think it would be better to make a game that followed the MMO model more closely instead of the standard casino model. A game where you truely could participate in nearly any activity without spending real money. It would just take time. I feel like there is a gap waiting to be filled.

Take EVE Online's market structure, and focus on time as a resource. Add Entropia's Real Money backed internal currency (with a highly restricted supply). Then have the entire game designed such that a player doesn't ever actually need currency to advance. All things can be obtained if spends enough time on enough things. Standard MMO advancement means that an old player will likely have an advantage over new players, but ideally the gap should not get too big, possibly due to resource sinks.

Due to the need for currency sinks (to pay for the game service) combined with an ever growing amount of non-currency resources, the game is likely to suffer from some rather strong deflationary pressure. However, the lower the price is for goods, the more likely people are to prefer paying real money, instead of time, to acquire them, which would help lift prices back up. I would be very interested in learning what price things end up stabilizing at.