Onlife #17

OK, I know that I promised last week to have IGE's Steve Salyer answer some of your questions this week, but as of press time, I've yet to get his responses. His publicist assured me that he's crazy busy, though, so we won't hold it against him too much. The long-awaited GameSpy Readers Vs. Steve Salyer bout will just have to be postponed till the next installment of Onlife. On the bright side, this means that you have two more weeks to send in questions, so don't slack. I'll be waiting.

In the meantime, we should see this as an opportunity to shift gears a little bit. All this talk of secondary markets has made the tone of this column pretty dreary, at least on my end -- you should see some of the mail I've been getting. It's clear that many of you (among the ones that are responding, anyway) heartily disapprove of this aspect of the industry. I still got commerce on the brain, though; that just seems to be the theme in MMORPGs, these days.

You're no doubt heard of "/pizza." It's a new service that Sony Online Entertainment has introduced into EverQuest II, which allows users to order Pizza Hut pies without exiting the game client. You simply type the aforementioned command into the chat buffer, and a window pops up. Peep the clever promo page here.


Upon seeing it, my first thought was that it was some kind of gag -- that a WoW fan with some modest web skillz free time put it together for kicks, or something. But no, it was true. Soon after, I was like, "What's next, /nikes? /lapdance?" Seriously, what's next? I'm not going to jump on no high horse, and harp on how unethical it is to promote unhealthy food to people with sedentary hobbies. I'll leave that to you guys. I'd rather muse on the absurdity of it, and think of the future applications of this sort of thing. Anarchy Online is already doing something like it, with a company called Massive Incorporated. Apparently, Funcom has sold space on the many billboards that dot AO's cities to the in-game advertising agency, the content of which will be only be visible to players with free subscriptions. I'm curious as to what will be on them -- ads for other MMOs, perhaps? It would make sense.

Anyway, I was curious as to what the official word was behind /pizza, and future deals of that ilk, so I hit up SOE's Chris Kramer. Mr. Kramer is the Director of Corporate Communications over there, so he's pretty clued in as to what the big plan is. He got back to me pretty quickly, so turn the page, and check the fruits of his labor. Much thanks to him for the swift response.