We were one of the early virtual currency games in the US. Um, and, uh, a friend of mine had actually done this in his text MUD. And so I wrote to, it's called [Makaya], and I -- I wrote to offer Makaya. But the, uh, the -- we have economy in, uh, Puzzle Pirates where there's pieces of it that you get by playing and working, and puzzling and so on, and then the doubloons which are purchased with hard currency. In Puzzle Pirates we let players trade between the two. We have an automated market exchange. Um, and the players, you know, the market sets the price, um, and it does change significantly with significant events, if something comes out that's very desirable, it costs a lot of pieces of eight, the value pieces of eight goes up versus the doubloon, and so on. Um, it's pretty cool and the reason we did that, uh, was because we didn't want to make a "free to play" game where essentially to get anything good you had to pay. We wanted the paid content to be available to everyone in the game, and to facilitate the arbitrage between time and money, essentially. Um, and that's, uh, remains remarkably unusual -- the vast -- I cannot think apart from [Makaya] which is, uh, a MUD, and its relatives, um, I'm struggling to think of another game that supports exactly this kind of market exchange mechanism. Well, Spiral Knights, another one of our games, does. Um, and I think that may be because it ultimately, uh, may reduce revenue. We don't. We haven't obviously A/B tested it, uh, because it doesn't force players strictly to cough up, um. They can, you know, if they want some boots they can work and get those boots. But, um, I think it's enormously beneficial to the community of the game. I mean, we see people who spend a tremendous amount of time playing Puzzle Pirates over many years. Some of them have paid, some of them have paid a lot of money and some of them have paid nothing at all. And they've played similar amounts of time, are similarly influential in the world, and yeah, the person who's paid a lot more money probably has nicer clothes and a fancier house, but that stuff doesn't really matter. Um, you know, the game play experience and the ability to be a figure and involved in that world is, uh, not materially different.
