farbot.com

What's the free-to-play niche like these days? Not much of a niche anymore with the likes of Free Realms, Runes of Magic, and Dungeons & Dragons Online stomping around eating up player-hours left and right. Read more »

Read more »

I've really enjoyed playing two free MMO's over the past month or so while my Target service plan was busy keeping my PS3 away from Sony as long as possible. Free Realms by Sony Online Entertainment and Runes of Magic by Frogster (both Windows only, sorry Mac-heads) have been quite a bit of fun aimed at two really different markets. The upcoming August 4th re-launch of Dungeons & Dragons Online as a free to play MMO also has me excited.

Really, this is what the MMO makers want – a big enough pool of people to try their game who would never try it as a subscription-only game and then a subset of those who want to spend money to make continuing to play more pleasurable or worthwhile. But it's also what criminal hackers want, too. They want a teeming ocean of victims to fleece.

I used to think that criminal hackers probably only made bots to farm resources and maybe attack mobs automatically in MMO games, but an article I saw on CNet a while back covering online game hacking at a security conference opened my eyes to just how malevolent and far-reaching these criminal hackers can be in MMOs, and how apparently there's next to nothing the game owners can do to stop them. Read more »

Should we stop counting how many millions of people have created accounts on Free Realms? They've just announced that 3 million is their latest milestone, which they have hit in under 7 weeks since launch. Another celebratory set of free gifts -- this one oriented towards the in-game pets -- is being dropped in users' accounts that must be claimed by June 19th.

Guinness World Records also recognized them during E3 last week for conducting a concert live and in a virtual space simultaneously. You'd think someone would have done this before.

I haven't played Free Realms since just after I picked up my 2 million member gift. I've still found their upsell pitch to be very aggressive compared to that of Runes of Magic, which opts to let your compatriots kind of sell the paid services for them by parading around in-game with them. Given that nobody else in my household plays Free Realms yet I'm much more likely to put money into Runes of Magic, which I have been playing quite a bit lately while my PlayStation 3 sits untouched at a repair shop.

Seen on Massively.

With my PS3 out for repairs you'd think I'd be playing my PSP, but I've spent most of my time on my laptop checking out E3 coverage and playing the free-to-play, microtransaction-supported Runes Of Magic. Read more »