How free-to-play MMO cash shops worked

Closing the shop first is the common thread in these two sources. Players stopped being able to spend new money while they could still log in, and the publisher offered a refund or a conversion for what they already held.

The sources do not say how much money players had in these shops, so no figure is shown.

Why the order matters to a reader

A game page that says "servers closed" hides this step. The shop closing is an earlier dated event, and it is the one that affected players with a balance. Where a source gives it, this site records it separately.

Most item malls sell a mix of a few product types, and the type decides how a purchase affects play. Cosmetic items change how a character looks, such as outfits, pets or mounts, and leave the numbers alone. Convenience items save time or space, for example extra inventory slots, extra character slots or shortcuts for traveling. Boosts raise experience or drop rates for a limited period, so they speed up progress without changing the rules of the game.

Power items are the contested category. Equipment, upgrade materials or enhancement protection sold for real money can change how strong a character is compared with a player who does not buy them. Random boxes, sometimes called lotteries, gacha or loot boxes, sell a chance at an item instead of a known item. The last piece is the premium currency itself. Players top up an account balance with real money and spend it in the shop, which is how WonderKing's iCash and Karos Online's Karos Points worked.

How the archive publishers described their shops

The names differed from game to game, and the sources use them consistently. Ignited Games' December 2011 notice for WonderKing, published on the msupdate blog on 17 December 2011, calls the shop the Item Mall and the balance iCash. Engadget's report of 6 April 2012 on Karos Online speaks of the cash shop and in-game currency purchases that had stopped. Ignited's release of 12 April 2012, reposted by N4G, says Karos Points would be converted to iCash for players moving to Rosh Online. The individual items sold in these shops are not listed, so this guide does not describe any specific item or price.

Random boxes are the part of a cash shop that outside rules address most directly, and each rule below comes from a named report. TouchArcade reported on 21 December 2017 that Apple had updated App Store Review Guideline 3.1.1, and Fenwick's summary dated 26 December 2017 gives the wording: apps offering loot boxes or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item before purchase. PocketGamer.biz reported on 31 May 2019 that Google Play had added a similar requirement, so the probability of receiving loot box items must be clearly stated.

Korea, the home of several of the archive games, moved from self-regulation to law. Game World Observer reported on 28 February 2023 that the National Assembly had passed an amendment to the Game Industry Promotion Act on 27 February, requiring developers to disclose the probability of chance-based items, with fines of up to 20 million won or up to two years in prison for omitting the information or publishing false odds. The same report says the K-GAMES industry association had introduced its own self-regulatory rules in 2021. None of these rules existed when the archive games ran their shops in 2010 to 2012, and it is unclear whether those shops sold random items.

A free price tag says nothing about the shop. Valve's Steamworks documentation explains the reason: a free-to-play game on Steam is a free license, and for in-game purchases developers do not enter pricing into Steamworks at all, because prices are set on the game's own backend. A Steam page therefore cannot show what the shop sells, and the reader has to look elsewhere, starting with the description and the in-game shop itself.

Three questions help. First, which product types appear: cosmetics, convenience items, boosts or items that change strength. Second, whether anything is sold as a random box, and whether the odds are shown before purchase, as the Apple and Google rules above require for apps on those stores. Third, what the shop does when the service ends. The WonderKing notice and the Karos Online reports are the archive's examples: refunds and conversions were announced after the shop had already stopped selling.