Riding hot on the coattails of yesterday’s Red 5 and microtransactions conversation, Gamasutra’s Brandon Sheffield sat down with DC Universe Online’s senior producer Wes Yanagi to talk about the game itself, development, and how RMT’s will factor into the game.

While a wide range of topics were discussed, the 500-pound gorilla in the room turned out to be the ye old subscriptions vs. microtransactions discussion.  Yanagi would not comment on whether DC Universe Online will go with one monetization method over the other, he did say that he thought microtransactions still have a huge potential.  Yanagi specifically pointed to Sony’s Free Realms, which he expects will turn a profit sooner or later, furthering the opinion that SOE is gently testing the free-to-play, microtransaction based waters and learning what the Western market will and will not accept.

Thankfully Yanagi and co. have learned quite a bit about MMO’s and their development, particularly the beta phase and when and when not to release a product to the general populace.  When asked about the development of DC Universe Online and MMO’s in general, along with producing a solid Beta (think the Hellgate London debacle), Yangani responds with,

“… For us, we’re playing it with the team, with our team. It’s kind of our product, our baby, and so it’s always “the best product ever,” and then we can keep playing on that.

But once we release it internally to other parts of SOE, we want to make sure that there’s another level of polish there, so that people are excited about that and then going on to the next step of any kind of closed beta.”

Given the opinions that we’ve heard far and wide in the Western market and the negative opinions regarding the ‘pay to pwn’ theory, introducing microtransactions to DC Universe Online might be a perfect gateway for SOE, as costume customizations in a superhero game simply go hand in hand.  Sony’s already headed down this path with the customizable Little Big Planet outfits, likewise with home.  Toss in the microtransaction based Superhero costume customizations that City of Heroes has already tested the waters on, and adding microtransactions to DC Universe Online is simply a no brainer.

Tags: Brandon Sheffield, dc universe, free realms, hellgate london, microtransaction, MMO, monetization, RMT, soe, Sony, superhero game, Wes Yanagi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under industry news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.