In-Game-Purchases has become an effective method for monetizing virtual contents. And as technologies like online banking and electronic credit card transaction became more widely used, most startup game studios prefer to have the Freemium business model.
Freemium games usually attract players with their “Free to Play” ad to get a healthy player population. But as the players progress in the game, they will feel less comfortable staying as a “free-player”. Obviously, the game designers made it on purpose so that players are more likely to purchase any extra contents or features offered through in-game-purchases. Almost all freemium MMORPGs contains cash contents such as various in game items, and in the early days of MMORPGs anything can be traded with another player.
Virtual economy systems that contains real world cash flow became increasingly controversial as in game crime rate kept rising. We see players getting their valuable items stolen or accounts hacked. Sometimes, the player’s personal information and even credit card number get compromised as a result. Such incidents are extremely difficult to resolve because it is just as hard to find these criminals as finding any other cyber terrorist like the ones who attacked Sony, Target, etc.
As a result, game makers began to improve security of the players' account and their in game properties. For instance, Blizzard Entertainment began to require every player who desire to spend cash on in game content to setup a two step verification process with cellphone or electronic authenticator. Valve has a system to ask players' to confirm an in game trade or cash transaction through e-mail so that a hacker cannot steal anything from the account unless he also hacks the player's e-mail. Some companies just do not want to deal the security problems and bind all of the players' in game purchased content to the purchasing account.
But even with all this effort, account hacking and in game scams are still not eliminated. Not even Blizzard's Battle.Net Authenticator can realize a perfect protection. (See: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Blizzard-Admits-Accounts-With-Authenticators-Have-Been-Hacked-42909.html) Is there an ideal way to solve virtual property stealing? Maybe removing the virtual economic system so that no one can make profit from the in game items, but such rules will significantly downgrade the game’s playability. So how should online game companies further address such issues? They really could not do much about it because security has been a major issue since the beginning of the internet era.
By enabling the ability to anonymously connect users over the network, the internet inherently has security problems. If one computer can connect to another computer, then information on both end are exposed to each other. Although internet security has developed to the point that remote data access has become increasingly difficult without various authentication methods, there isn’t any bulletproof defense
Should game companies continue to improve their security systems? Of course they should, but we cannot expect them to completely eliminate the hackers activities in the virtual world. Even though digital computer have been around for more than a decade now, we still do not have a full understanding of its limitation. This back and forth battle between the hackers and security guards in the cyber space will continue just like the situation between thieves and police in real life. Lastly, I will just make this statement again even though it should be a common knowledge by now: you should take whatever action needed to make your virtual property more secure rather than putting all your hopes on the security systems.
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