I think the LN is definetely a good way for realizing such a MMO currency system.

But i doubt wether this is what game publisher want.
They could simply use a centralized system (e.g. buy ingame currency with btc) to earn more from people who aren't even going to spend every last 'cent'.
It is definetely more lucrative for them to realize it that way than using a decentralized system.

At the current state the LN is not ready yet. It is still in beta and still has to be proven stable and secure before it is going to be used for 'mainstream' payments.

Honestly, I think it will be a good idea because with this Lightning Network, people can make quick payments without waiting their transactions to be confirmed, I bet that sooner few new games will start to use the LN in-game.

Currently, i used bitrefill to recharge my phone using bitcoin, I am surprised that this site use the Lightning Network, I got my fund within few seconds, it's really amazing.

I think these game developers are more focussed on "selling" their own game tokens than having to deal with Bitcoin and it's capped coins. Just imagine if you had the ability to create tokens, by just editing and configuring a few parameters in your own database. <Infinite supply of tokens>

You also do not have to worry about spam attacks and confirmation delays. Your main focus is just to protect your proprietary database and the generation of the game tokens. <not getting hacked>

The Payments are handled by Banks and PayPal, so you do not have to protect a wallet or cold storage. The tax implications are also easy, because the payment services are dealing with the complexity of currency conversion. You also deal with something that are already defined as a currency. <Not like Bitcoin that are not accepted as a currency in most countries>

Is the LN capable of handling that kind of volume? Nobody knows, because it is still experimental technology.   

Remember that before Steam was accepting Bitcoin as a mode of payment but there comes a time where they pull off Bitcoin in their system and that is because of expensive transactions as well as their volatility. Now that the "expensive" part is solve there is still volatility left to handle. This businesses care more about getting their full cut done but when Bitcoin starts falling down from 20,000$ it looks like they it is not achievable for them. Remember they are still basing their games off the dollar and sometimes they are getting lesser after the payment is done. This is what other businesses have to risk if they want to accept cryptocurrencies as a mode of payment.

The in game earnings are the domain of the players, not the service provider. They'll always charge in dollars as that's what their outgoings are too.

But you're also right. I'm sure many a player would go squealing to them. That's why it makes more sense to create something from scratch by the players and for the players who understand what the deal is from the start.

If a corporate game included crypto they'd rapidly find themselves becoming some sort of exchange and that's a head ache no one needs.

You have brought up a very good point here. In a way, these game developers wants to force people to use their in-game currency or token, to prevent them from leaving. They need something that would keep people playing the same game and not jumping from one game to the next.

So, if they used Bitcoin as a "default" currency in all games, people will jump from the one game to the next and they might lose players.

I think it would be quite the opposite though, because a wider target market will attract more Bitcoiners to games that accept it as a in-game currency. < I personally like the convenience of using one currency for all my games >

You made a very cool statement there. 

The problem is, if this becomes mainstream and all MMOs start to use Bitcoin, then the price will skyrocket and in the end 1

Satoshi might end up costing you $1. Yes, it will be good for investors/hoarders like us, but it will be pretty expensive for the

millions of gamers out there. The gamers hate us already, because we are buying all the GPUs for Crypto mining. 

Game designers create in-game currency and economy for way more reasons than just transactions speed/fees, the point of in-game money is to reward players for playing the game and game companies obviously can't reward players with real money, because it will be unsustainable and attract botters. What developers can do is to simply use Bitcoin as one of their payment methods and then allow players to sell their in-game items/currency on in-game market for Bitcoin. But they will still have to fight with bots, because bots easily ruin game experience for honest players, and in the end games succeed or fail basing on their quality, not some flashy features like blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It also might be the case that it's not profitable for game companies to allow p2p real money market, for example Blizzard have scrapped their real-money auction house in Diablo 3, and Valve made most Dota 2 items untradable.

If you are using Bitcoin as your in-game currency, you will be just giving away free money to botters. If in-game currency can be traded for Bitcoin on p2p market, then bots will also do a lot of damage, they will crash the price of in-game currency so honest players won't be able to get proportionally rewarded for their time spent and the game will overall feel like pay to win, which most players hate. And bots can't be nuked, you can ban some, but there will always be more and more, especially if they bring quick returns.

I think the problems will start when bots create havoc and also farming on a large scale. The On-chain Bitcoin transactions are for the most part, irreversible, so the game developer will not have a tool to stop this, once the channel is closed.

This will quickly ruin the in-game economy or the money pool, if someone figure out a way to exploit it. We regularly see how bad the third party code is in some of the exchanges. Can you think how hackers will be drawn to large MMO games, if millions of people are using Bitcoin on their platforms?