The Rare Item Economy Within Ultima Online

The developers of Cartwright are a game we talked about in previous episodes the Korean game that really introduced the concept of free to play with virtual goods being its core business model those developers studied Ultima online and in particular the rare economy. Raph Koster says it was explicit they like called him up to discuss this with him when they were creating Cartwright or they literally called him up for some insight into how the rare item economy within Ultima online evolved. It's almost as kind of a jackpot like loot box type concept where you would periodically have rare items introduced into the game and they would become incredibly covetedThose things in some sense are a direct line to the modern world because the developers