Yesterday Joel "Raijinn" Sasaki announced on the official Vanguard forums that players will soon be able to use Live Gamer Exchange to sell their virtual items for money in the real world. Sony Online Entertainment, the developer behind Vanguard, already works with Live Gamer on EverQuest 2 to provide users a way to trade their in-game loot for cash in the real world.

The ethics of RMT aside, the addition of Live Gamer to Vanguard gives players interested in participating in the service a sanctioned, safer means of doing virtual-to-real-world business, forcing the deals through official channels rather than leaving players at the mercy of eBay, PayPal and other third-party sites to resolve disputes.

Live Gamer's pending arrival in Vanguard has been announced a little over a month after John Smedley, President of SOE, said in an interview with Virtual Goods News that the RMT service wouldn't make an appearance in the game. We reached out to SOE for clarification yesterday but as of this writing have not received a response.

[Thanks, Chris!]

EDIT: We were contacted by Mr. Smedley after this article went live to clarify that in the interview he gave last month he said that StationCash wouldn't make it into Vanguard, not that no RMT service would ever appear in the game.

SOE brings real money transactions to Vanguard [Updated] originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.