Free to Play Cast: Everquest Patching, Updates, and the Cash Shop Ep. 137

From the Best Buy analogy and with all the banning, it's more like the tag was $19.99, you went to the register, paid $19.99 for it, then got the cops called on you as you walked out the door.

Mike, to the point of the price of the digital items - You're right, they don't cost anything to reproduce once made.

But remember, they're not just paying for themselves and the time it took to create them (it's more than a few hundred bucks between the art, backend, QA and others involved in getting the item created and into the store for purchase). Those items are literally paying for the game. They're paying for the coders, the artists, the bandwidth costs, electricity, health care coverage etc. Just as a subscription in a P2P MMO covers those things in addition to providing access.

This is something I think far too few people remember. Those items in the cash shop (in addition to an optional subscription for some games) are literally how these companies keep the light on and staff employed. When you have a big volume of them moving at what are clearly unintended prices (it would be like walking into Best Buy and seeing a computer marked down to $15, which should instantly trigger red flags for anyone with a brain), that's a huge amount of potential revenue being flushed down the toilet.

I agree that DBG has been awful in how they've handled this and they shouldn't be handing out bans (just revoking the items and returning peoples Station Cash), but let's be real here. Those items are their livelyhood and those people took advantage of something prices that were very clearly in error.