Philip Reisberger, Chief Games Officer at Bigpoint Games, is a complicated man. I want to hug him, because he turned Battlestar Galactica into an MMO. But Reisberger’s company is consistently cruising for a patriotic wedgie, talking down the status of companies whose chump change amounts to more than Bigpoint Game’s quarterly revenue. Last November, Heiko Hubertz (Bigpoint CEO) stated that The Old Republic will never be profitable.
Not to be one-upped by Hubertz, Reisberger stated in an interview that the big developers just don’t understand monetizing games, and that developers should be pursuing systems where players can pay extra to gain an advantage instead of offering vanity items.
“It’s a delicate balance, though, and that’s why I love my game designers. All of them have understood how to do this. If you have a sophisticated approach to free-to-play games, in the end you can monetise everything.”
Even more interesting is Reisberger’s insistence that it is possible to offer an in-game advantage for cash without altering the balance of the game, which exactly untrue. By selling items that players can attain through normal grinding/leveling, developers have found a way to technically give players an advantage (time) by removing the factor of grind, without unbalancing the game as those items can be attained through standard gameplay anyway.
We’ll see how players respond to Reisberger’s statement as time goes on.
MMO Fallout 
did an editorial on this topic earlier: http://mmogamersauce.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/news-in-the-key-of-f2p/