Gamasutra - Virtual Items, Digital Snake Oil?
While the concept of paying for something so virtual initially seemed alien to me and my experience, I thought back to good old La Val’s Pizza in Berkeley, where I grew up. How many quarters did I scam out of my parents so that I could get a few more lives in Final Fight, or another go at Rampart? In essence I was renting time with the game -- the virtual items I was paying for were lives. In practice, these free-to-play games that run on microtransactions (even moreso subscription or pay-per-play games), which many core or old-school players decry, extrapolate from a revenue stream that comes from the very source of electronic games.