Live Gamer Appoints VP Product Marketing, Partners With True Games

Virtual item trading platform Live Gamer has announced that it has appointed Kurtis Buckmaster as its vice president of product marketing. Buckmaster brings 18 years of professional and personal gaming and MMO expertise to Live Gamer, where he will be responsible for driving improvements and additions to the Live Gamer Exchange platform, as well as working on product implementations and managing community relations. Previously, Buckmaster served as the vice president of marketing and product development worldwide at MMOG portal Curse Gaming. Prior to that, he worked as a senior manager in GameSpot's (CNET Networks) Community and Customer Service division. He also held marketing positions at both Ubisoft Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment America. Live Gamer, a turnkey solution provider for MMOG and virtual world operators to enable real money trading of virtual assets, has also announced that a partnership with newly-founded online game publisher True Games Interactive. The two companies hope to integrate a convenient, secure, and reliable outlet to buy and sell virtual goods and objects in True Games' future published titles. Live Gamer recently revealed an agreement with Sony Online Entertainment in February to replace SOE's Station Exchange on EverQuest II servers with its web-based Live Gamer Exchange Service for real-money purchase and sale of virtual goods in the MMO. Established earlier this year by former K2 Network publishing and operations execs Jeff Lujan and Bob Drobish, True Games' provides a platform for free-to-play microtransactions-driven titles. The company is currently negotiating several product deals and securing Series A funding. Its first as-yet untitled game is scheduled to launch in Q3 2008. True Games also announced a partnership in April with real-time strategy games developer Petroglyph Games (Star Wars: Empire At War, Universe At War) to create an online microtransactions-funded game for PCs. Said True Games Interactive chief publishing officer Jeff Lujan: "It is our mission as a company to provide the highest quality entertainment and we can only do that by associating with the highest quality partners and trusting our games to them. Our relationship with Live Gamer represents one of many quality partners you can expect to see aligned with True Games."