Mark Ward, the very nice gentleman at the BBC who threw a quote from me up on the BBC technology site a while back, has been emailing me once in a while to chat about them thar online games. The result is me getting quoted in an article. Which is … a bit strange. But British strange! And thus, good.

The quote is me being skeptical of the Live Gamer service. Which … yeah.

Michael Zenke, an editor at online game website MMOG Nation, expressed scepticism about Live Gamer’s prospects. Despite the rampant participation in real-money trade by players, it’s still a big taboo to talk about it,” he said. “‘Legit’ outfits are going to have a hard time getting an edge over the farmers of today, because there are certain companies (EA, Mythic, Blizzard) that will never ally with them,” he told the BBC News website. He expected that Live Gamer would find some success with those players who want a reliable source and a further few who did not like the tactics of gold sellers. “Otherwise,” he said, “I don’t see there being much room for traction there.”

In a nutshell, I think it’s great that they want to make the RMT business legit. They’re only going to work with companies that agree to the idea of RMT. They’re going to avoid buying from farmers, and if they find out they’ve been scammed they can blacklist them from future transactions. Theoretically this means they can slowly push out the undesirables while allowing folks who want to engage in the practice some measure of safety.

The problem is that some companies are never going to play ball. Mythic and Blizzard have just as many problems with the farmers as anyone else, but I find it extremely unlikely that they’ll agree to a service like this in order to solve those issues. So every game those two companies run will (by definition) have an underground RMT component. Even if every other company jumped into Live Gamer’s lap, I’m relatively certain the profit to be made for selling gold in Warhammer and Wow would be enough to make the venture worthwhile.