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Sony Online Entertainment, the developer of massively multiplayer online games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, is the first major U.S. publisher to facilitate the buying and selling of virtual goods.

Late Tuesday, the company unveiled Station Exchange, an auction site that allows players to spend real money on virtual weapons, armor, coins and new, high-level characters.

The service isn't set to go live until the end of June, and will initially be restricted to the wildly popular EverQuest II game, which in five months has built a player base of more than 350,000.

If the service is a success, similar auction services will be established for Sony's other online games, the company said.

The move is surprising because SOE has been one of the fiercest and most vocal opponents of MMO players who spend real money on virtual assets.

Like SOE, most MMO publishers ban the practice, making the traffic of virtual goods almost entirely illicit. Players are often cheated by shady traders who don't deliver as promised or who rescind payment after getting an item. As a result, SOE claims its customer service staff is constantly bogged down with angry players who have been defrauded.

But virtual goods may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and there's a lot of money to be made brokering the deals.

"Sony has finally dropped the other shoe," said Dan Hunter, a professor at the Wharton School of Business and an expert in virtual economies. "Finally, we understand what their reluctance (has been). It's not that the gameplay has been affected by (virtual goods trafficking), but rather, their objection has been that they can't monetize it."

SOE claims the auction site is primarily about offering players a safe and secure marketplace for buying and selling virtual goods. But the company readily acknowledges the new system could bring in hefty new revenues.

"When 40 percent of our customer service man-hours are dealing with fraud, it's in our interest to deal with it," said John Smedley, SOE's president. "We don't want to hide the fact that we're going to make money."

Smedley said that because many SOE players are opposed to users buying their way to game success through paid-for characters, weapons and the like, the company will implement the auction system on a limited number of EverQuest II servers. Those opposed to buying virtual goods will have their own servers to play on.

Some observers think Sony's initiative is a good thing for MMOs, but not everyone's convinced.

"There's going to be a lot of people who are really strongly against it," said Michael Shea, a longtime EverQuest player and writer for the fan site Mobhunter.com. "Most of the people who end up buying characters or items are really looked down upon.... They're not creating the same sort of social connections as someone who starts at level one and works their way up."

Shea said the EverQuest community reacted furiously when SOE conducted a survey a year ago asking for opinions on initiatives like Station Exchange.

"People were like, 'You money-grubbing bastards,'" Shea said. "People were saying, 'I'm quitting this game if that's the kind of company you are.'"

But Ed Castronova, who teaches the dynamics of virtual worlds at the University of Indiana and who has been a longtime opponent of virtual goods trading, said Sony's plan is a good thing.

"I'm actually excited," he said. "I think it's a brilliant business move, and I think it's good for gamers."

One company that SOE's move may not be good for is IGE, the world's-largest seller of MMO virtual goods. That's because IGE -- which sells items bought both from players looking for a little cash for their extra weapons as well as from "farmers," hourly employees whose sole job is to earn weapons, currency and other items in MMOs like EverQuest II -- is likely to see SOE undercut its business.

But IGE founder Brock Pierce said he welcomed the advent of Station Exchange.

"I'm pleased to hear of SOE's announcement," Pierce said. It "provides further validation of the secondary market for MMO virtual assets."

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently announced it would allow micropayments in its Xbox Live service, allowing players to buy small items on the fly.

Lisa Jensen, a spokeswoman for Blizzard Entertainment, a Sony rival behind World of Warcraft, said her company is waiting to see what happens, and isn't changing its policy banning the trade of its game's goods.

Likewise, NCSoft, which publishes such popular MMO titles as Lineage II and City of Heroes, said it had no immediate plans to follow SOE's lead.

"This is definitely something where there is consumer demand for it," said Jeremy Gaffney, NCSoft's vice president of product development, "and so we're very interested in seeing how Sony's experiment with it works."