Every now and then, I try to convince a producer that “Billing model” is one of the next great design challenges. It usually takes more convincing than you would think. There’s an old line of thinking in this industry that billing is a business decision, not a design one. In fact, in no company that I’ve worked for have the designers sat at the table with the business guys to decide what to charge players for a monthly fee.

This is pretty classical thoery inside of the business world. Marketing students are taught ‘the four P’s’ – pricing, promotion, product and placement – as the primary decisions to make when marketing your item. The inference is clear – pricing what you’re selling is very different than deciding what you’re going to sell. Of course, even in the classic world, the business strategy is more unified than that. Netflix and Budget Rent-A-Car are two companies that compete on price in unique ways – and both companies built a product specifically with that in mind.

There are interesting parallels in the game space. Magic: the Gathering and Runescape are two games that were designed with specific pricing structures in mind, and as such, the game mechanics of the game were able to embrace it and leverage it. By comparison,Bethesda’s experiment with microtransactions feels like a blatant money grab. The technology of Oblivion might have been built with horses and orrery quests in mind, but the design was not. As a result, people who play MTG are delighted about the chance to slap down $80 bucks to buy a box of the upcoming booster pack expansion, while the people who spent 2 bucks for a horse in Oblivion are mad as hell.

One of the more successful games with an alternate business model is Achaea – a free-to-play text mud where you can buy additional items in game for real cash. One reason why they’ve been so successful pursuing that model is the lead designer and the biz guy was the same fellow in the early days. By ensuring that the design and the pricing plan are in perfect sync, Achaea’s design team has managed to create an experience that feels enriched by the alternate pricing structure rather than cheapened by it. And therein lies the key.