So the holidays are upon us, and you know what that means: mad money is being changed hands, typically not in favor of folks like you and I. If you're a regular reader of Onlife, you'll know that money is one of my favorite topics. Not because I have a whole lot of it, but because of the myriad ways that real-world economics have begun to influence and infiltrate the online games that we play. The line between virtual and actual wealth is growing continually blurrier, and that's exciting and sobering at the same time. But this column isn't about the fools who buy gold or citizens of developing countries that facilitate that kind of commerce. This time around, I want to talk about how the game publishers themselves are attempting to get rich off leisure time.

You know the drill: you pay cash up front to buy a game at retail, plug in your credit card number (or your mommy's), and play for free for a month. Maybe you soon realize you don't like the game, but you forget to cancel the subscription, and wind up being charged for six months before you get off your rear and press the magic button. Either that, or you lose yourself so effectively in that awesome new world that you forget the flea-like trickle being sucked out of your bank account every month. Both ways, the publishers get paid. But you know what? Many publishers aren't convinced that enough of you are willing to dish out fifteen-or-some-odd dollars a month.

Only real players may enter.

It's obvious that many of you are. Just look at the numbers that certain games are posting these days. Don't know about you, but the sum of five million would have seemed preposterous as recently as two years ago. But to hear the analysts tell it, the number of North American players willing to fork over money every month to play an online game has just about reached capacity. This sort of doom-and-gloom forecast probably has a lot to do with why publishers are getting so damn creative with their business models. It's all good, though. I'm sure you're all for things being more flexible in regards to losing your money. That said, let's look at some of the trends that seem to be emerging.

The Velvet Rope

Popularized partially by the completely-out-of-left-field success of Runescape, this sort of business model enables a publisher to let players effectively play a large portion of the game for free, and charging them once they pass a certain threshold. This could entail, say, forcing players to pay up once their characters reach a certain level, or allowing subscribers access to premium servers. In either case, it's a pretty ingenious system; gamers like to play free games, and implicitly, a game like that will eventually charge people to play it will likely boast a certain level of quality. When it comes time to pay up, the players will probably be pretty into the game, having established characters and relationships that they won't want to go to waste. Runescape, in my opinion, is just the beginning. Certain publisher have been making noise about developing "free" MMOs, so it wouldn't surprise me to see variations on this model in the future.