CCP Games Chief Marketing Officer Ryan S. Dancey recently spoke with Gamasutra's Christian Nutt about the state of EVE Online and what makes the sci-fi title unique. EVE has traits that many MMOs don't, such as player governance, a dynamic virtual economy, and slow but continual subscription growth. CCP does face problems in tandem with that growth however, namely from RMT operations. There is also the issue of balancing developer control over aspects of the game's economy (mission rewards, salvage and loot drops, ISK sinks) with the ideal of allowing EVE's economy to be as player-driven as possible, explains Dancey.

Among other things discussed in the interview, Gamasutra asks how White Wolf has changed following the merger with CCP Games nearly three years ago. Dancey tells Gamasutra: "It's just an imprint... White Wolf used to have a fairly large staff. It doesn't anymore. It's focusing primarily on the World of Darkness RPG products. It's not doing some of the things it used to do; board games and other card games and things. The focus of the company [CCP] is on making MMOs and our legacy table top business is a legacy business."

Linden Lab has released the figures for the third-quarter performance of Second Life.

If you want the short version, it wasn't a growth quarter. Q3 2009 figures were not really very distinguishable from Q2 2009. There's actually nothing wrong with that. Growth plateaus are occasional and inevitable and generally represent a good opportunity for engineering and support to catch up a little with the service.

Seems that most of what you hear in and about Second Life recently revolves around creator rights, copyrights, trademarks, intellectual property rights, infringement and so forth. It's not that intellectual property infringement is new – you can certainly replicate content with the official viewer if you know how – but it is in the limelight and a major feature of Second Life discussions by virtue of assorted high-profile infringements, and legal actions.

Copyright infringement can't be made to go away. Since the Statute of Anne in 1710 originally codified copyrights in law, infringement has only been somewhat quelled by various means, never practically eliminated. In these predominantly digital times, there are many new tradeoffs could be made that could reduce the incidence of infringement, but at the cost of also reducing functionality.

While Linden Lab allows you to submit a DMCA notice via post or fax, there is a third option that's valid while you're waiting for the promised new DMCA process to come along.

While many service- and platform-providers insist that they do not accept emailed DMCA notices, if you submit them correctly, the provider is lawfully obligated to accept them. Interestingly, a proper DMCA notice by email can actually give the recipient more surety about the identity of the submitter than faxed or posted notices.

Linden Lab have installed a new account setting for Second Life users, where an account can be marked as a 'scripted agent' (which you can call a 'bot' if you prefer). At present, it isn't actually known what effect the marker has, or to what use it is being put. At some future time, we are told, it may be used to exempt accounts from contributing to the Second Life parcel-traffic system.

Right now, though, it's sort of like being asked "Would all citizens who have firearms and do not use them to break the law, please leave your name at your local police-station." That is, there doesn't seem anything actually wrong with the idea, but you've got to wonder why it is being asked at this time.

We reported back in August that Nexon America had begun the third Quarter of 2009 with a very solid July; their revenue for the month grew 35% over the numbers for July 2008. Now that Q3 is over, they are happily touting some additional (and still impressive) figures. August 2009 beat out last year's August revenues by 32%, and September hit a lofty 44% growth in revenues compared to the same time in 2008. Overall, Nexon America's third quarter revenue grew 36% compared to Q3 2008.

Nexon America's CEO David Kim pointed out that this success comes without the bump that releasing a new game often brings: "Increasing our revenues without having added any new games to the company's portfolio for more than a year tells me that we are on the right track. Dungeon Fighter Online is just ramping up, so no revenues generated by that game are reflected in the outstanding third quarter we've had.

Dungeon Fighter Online is still in open beta, but an item mall has just been launched for the game. We can only imagine that Nexon's growth will continue when these revenues begin to show up on future financial reports.

Numerous Second Life content creators are warning their clientele that the Web-site virtualget.net (which has been apparently been operating for a couple of months now) is a credit-card harvesting scam. Whether that's correct or not, the site appears to be using the product images and product descriptions and trademarks of numerous Second Life content creators without their permission. The original images and text appear on Linden Lab's Xstreet SL virtual goods shopping Web-site.

Numerous DMCA notices are reportedly being filed by content creators at present. We attempted to contact virtualget.net (anonymously registered in Singapore) for comment, but none of their email addresses appeared to be functional -- One email address was restored to function when the majority of the site was taken down a short time ago, but we received no response. Linden Lab, who has an intellectual property stake in the matter, was not available for comment either.

Users of Kaspersky protection software found the Web-site marked as a phishing site several hours ago, presumably based on user reports.

Update: The operation seems to have disabled access to much of the site in the wake of numerous DMCA notices filed by content-creators.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

It's no secret that MMOs have been embraced by researchers for a variety of purposes, with everything from social dynamics to the spread of diseases being modeled within the contained environment of a video game. A group of researchers over at Indiana University were attracted for just that reason, and began studying the ways that virtual economies mirror real-world economies on Everquest II. The full story can be found here, with some discussion regarding the relationship between the playerbase and the way it affects the real-world economic concerns of these games.

Certainly it's an interesting field of study, but it brings to mind one of the major ways in which an MMO economy doesn't have the ability to mirror a real-world economy: the fact that the stream of money going in to players is essentially unlimited, since there will always be roaming enemies to kill and ways to make money. It's also surprising that the study would be focused on EQII instead of the darling child of MMO economies, EVE, of which there could be and have been entire publications written solely about its economy. However, the interplay between the real economy and the virtual one isn't likely to go away, especially with the rise of free-to-play games in prominence.

[ via GamePolitics ]

Realtime Worlds is becoming synonymous with Scotland's game development with their upcoming title All Points Bulletin, but there are reports the company may consider relocating to Ireland. As one of Scotland's most prominent development studios, Realtime Worlds is keenly aware that as the computer games industry grows the UK lags behind other countries in terms of tax incentives. (Edge Online has an excellent overview of the situation which details how UK firms pay tax on R&D while countries like Canada and France provide rebates for game developers.) The situation as it affects Realtime Worlds and other Dundee-based companies is that if corporate tax breaks aren't possible in Scotland, they may need to head to greener pastures. Even moreso if such pastures include a 5-year tax holiday, which was mentioned at last weekend's Global Irish Economic Forum in Dublin.

Herald Scotland quotes Colin Macdonald, Realtime Worlds Studio Manager, as saying,"If the package on offer in Ireland was attractive we'd have to give it serious consideration. [...] Dundee is a great place to be based, one of the main hubs for computer games in Britain, but at the end of the day we've got to look after our bottom line."

The Virtual Goods Summit has been an annual event since 2007, and features speakers from organizations all over the world, all focused on virtual goods, and virtual economies. This year's summit in San Francisco features quite a lineup, including the delicious Steve Meretzky, Turbine's accomplished Fernando Paiz, the engaging John Smedley of SOE, and plenty more.

Through the Virtual Goods Summit, developers and publishers share knowledge and get a deeper understanding of virtual goods and economies, how they function, their challenges and how to maximize the opportunities inherent in them. The Virtual Goods Summit runs on 30 October (with an optional half-day seminar on the 29th, covering the fundamentals and drivers of virtual economies, called Virtual Goods Summit University.

Want to get to the summit with a 15% discount on general admission? Register for the summit and use the code MASSIVELY at the checkout, and save! There's also discounted early-bird registration until 29 September.

When EVE Online developer CCP Soundwave isn't entertaining fans of internet spaceships with his wit during the EVE Alliance Tournament, he's apparently finding new ways to ... impose taxes on players? His dev blog today explains that CCP Games will tax the earnings of players in NPC corps and their reasons for introducing this taxes. This won't apply to those in EVE's player corporations or those enlisted with a militia for factional warfare. "Service guarantees citizenship and all that, so keep on trucking," he writes. (Note: For those less familiar with EVE Online, this deals entirely with in-game currency of course, InterStellar Kredits or ISK. No real world taxation is involved.)

After all these years, why impose taxes on players in NPC corps? CCP Soundwave explains it all in "I Bring Gifts! (By Gifts I Mean Taxes, Sorry)". NPC corps have a few advantages over player corps in that they cannot have wars declared against them by player corporations; immunity to wardecs is perhaps a key reason some players don't move on to player corps. In addition, members of NPC corporations don't have taxes subtracted from their NPC bounties and mission rewards, which most player corporations impose.

Generally, operators of MMOGs and virtual environments don't show their numbers unless they feel they've got something to crow about, and Linden Lab's crowing today, releasing a selection of figures that give you an idea of the scale of Second Life.

Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life. That's 108 million messages per day and more than 600 million words are typed on an average day. That's a whole of messages for any architecture, quite honestly.

Let's face it - microtransactions are big business. Nexon has posted a 35% increase in revenue this last July. Large companies like SOE and Cryptic Studios have added cash shops to their games. It appears that the world has a growing appetite for little bites of gaming content goodness. The market now is turning those bits and bytes into the MMO equivalent of the candy bar - with profits that are starting to climb towards the candy heights as well.

The honest truth is that we've been shifting more and more towards the idea of microtransactions as a culture, not just as a genre. Sure, we've always been about getting more bang for our buck - who isn't! But the fact is that there were no structures to distribute entertainment as effortlessly and cheaply as we can get it now even just a few decades ago. The proliferation of personal computers, the Internet, and other advances in technology have turned us into a society that loves to consume only what it wants, when it wants, from almost wherever we want it. Considering the overall societal shifts, it only makes sense that our favorite type of games are now going where the money is.

One of the unique aspects of the sci-fi massively multiplayer online game EVE Online is that it has a peer-elected council of players that represents the interests of EVE's subscribers to the title's developer CCP Games, working with them to improve the MMO. This select group of EVE Online players is called the Council of Stellar Management (CSM).

No other online game in operation has anything quite like it, but that's because EVE Online is one of the few games where something like this would even work. Given the scope of interactions that happen in EVE's single shard setting of thousands of solar systems where player actions have the potential to affect others in the game, it comes as no surprise that players can take the game very seriously. They form military and political alliances to conquer and hold regions of space. Players even establish financial institutions built upon the game's virtual economy. Any insider knowledge about how the game's New Eden galaxy will change through future development could be valuable. CSM delegates are expressly forbidden from divulging or using insider information for their own advantage, or those of their friends.

However, CCP Games revealed today that exactly such a situation has arisen. Larkonis Trassler, a prominent member of the Council of Stellar Management, used insider information to attempt to profit in the game's virtual InterStellar Kredit (ISK) currency. He has stepped down from his position on the council and his accounts have been banned by CCP for Non-disclosure Agreement violations.