In an exclusive interview with Sony Online Entertainment's David Christensen, new vice president of business development and international operations, Next-Gen was able to extract SOE's desire to trace Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft and deliver an MMO champ to be remembered by. Their first order of business was to establish an international footprint.

So while keeping a firm hand on Europe and North America, Sony Online Entertainment glanced over to the other half of the world and saw how much work lay waiting for them.

South America, India, Vietnam and the Philippines were just some of the names mentioned by Sony, after they identified the most active countries where MMO gamers would love to try out new games given the chance

But of course, Sony does have its share of competition. So far, Korean development companies have been also successful with their own local products that had taken Asia and parts of the West by storm. Trying to insert a viable product in the same market to compete with tried-and-tested (and free for the most part) MMOs would prove unnervingly difficult.

Hakkyu Kim's Granado Espada (Sword of the New World) is one such title that has just recently been tapped into by the Asian market following the recent announcement of a closed beta program. It's been gaining amazing foothold on most Asian countries and could become a brilliant Asian WoW by itself.

But Christensen is still keeping positive, claiming that they do have an ability to enter the local markets and not "be competing with several hundred MMOs" that gamers are already hooked into. SOE is currently trying to establish relations with key entertainment and online technology companies.

They already have games in Taiwan, China and Korea, but Christensen remains adamant that it's just "a very small footprint" they they have established on foreign markets. Is it safe to say that the world MMO market should be seeing Sony branded MMO games coming to other countries soon? With Sony's premier focus on catering to low-cost local economies, you could say that.

Over the past few years, there has been an ongoing battle between game publishers and third-party services which allow players of online games to engage in RMTs, or Real Money Transactions. As it is widely known, such activities go against the terms and conditions which are set by game operators, and are also disliked by some game loyalists as it disrupts the economy within the game. These transactions also provide ample opportunity for scams to occur. Several campaigns from non-gaming websites have also been launched in an effort to curb RMT-related activity.

Despite the negative image that RMT is associated with though, it seems that the people at Sony Online Entertainment may have finally found a way to strike a balance and get something good out of it all.

Last year, SOE initiated a one-year experiment in two of the servers in the MMORPG EverQuest II. Using its own auction system known as Station Exchange, Sony was able to provide a venue for players to trade virtual currency, characters, and in-game items. By keeping these users on its own turf, it was able to earn US$ 274,083 from listing fees and commissions from completed transactions, while spending almost nothing for running the service.

On top of this benefit for the company, the experiment also proved that this method is also beneficial to the players themselves, as the cases of disputes and fraud which were related to virtual property have dropped from 40% to 10%, plus they can trade freely without fear of having their account suspended due to TOA violations.

Another fringe benefit of the whole thing would be the surfacing of correct statistics. For the longest time, nobody was really sure just how many people were trading their virtual goods and just how much revenue this actually generated, as this information was mostly held secret by third-party RMT services. From the data that can be gathered by keeping RMT activity in-house, game designers and operators can then make accurate decisions when it comes to dealing with in-game economy.

John Smedley, President of Sony Online, also commented on this. "I'm a big believer that this whole virtual property thing is a big part of the future of online gaming, so it's about time to shed some light on the facts, rather than the fiction."

One interesting tidbit would be that during the one-year stint of Station Exchange in Everquest, the top seller was able to make a cool US$ 37,435 from 351 transactions. Whether this will start a whole line of people who will follow in Anshe Chung's footsteps still remains to be seen.