I was talking to a friend of mine while driving to work today about Gil Sellers in FFXI. He wondered, from a business perspective, why SE didn’t offer similar services that Gil Sellers are looking set to offer right from the very start of the game. For example, simply being able to buy Gil from SE’s website, buy a 75 Char, Rare/Ex items, etc, etc.
If they had offered such a service Gil Sellers today might not be a problem and SE would of gain huge profits from it. After all they could accomplish all services with some automated SQL, and wouldn’t actually need anyone to play to game for them.
Now you might argue “OMG but then SE are no better than the Gil Sellers!” – but you have to try and look at this from a positive perspective, if SE offered the services instead they would be 100% official, money back guarantee, and best of all there would be no Gil Sellers in game monopolising things.
I’m trying to keep this short as I don’t want to write a wall-o-text with all my thoughts and ideas on this. (I'll try and add more as the discussion goes on.) But how do you think the game would look today if SE had done something like this. (Please no leaking vaginas about how you worked hard for item X and it’s not fair that someone could just buy it.)
Could it of worked? Would it of actually made the game better? Do you think they might in the future?