What ever happened to all the talk of using microtransactions for games, using bitcoins as a virtual currency?
Bitcoin still works as a micropayment system, for games or otherwise, but as a standardized internal debit system. Imagine if Farmville switched to Bitcoin, using Mybitcoin.com's internal multi-user online wallet format.
Game sites could do this all day, sending and receiving at will to/from the Bitcoin network, but internally functioning as a 'virtual currency'. When you're done playing, you could just ask for your balance back and get it in ten minutes or less. What we need to see happen is for these various online wallet sites to standardize their transactions between themselves, removing another layer of burden from the Bitcoin network. For example, A.com, B.net and C.org are all versions of online wallets. A.com is just an online wallet site, B.net is a gaming site and C.org is a market site (I.E. Etsy). At first, none of these sites trust one another, as none of them have much of a history; so interactions occur entirely over the Bitcoin network. Eventually, traffic on the Bitcoin network starts to push up the cost of transactions to a level that, from the collective perspectives of websites, justifies the work of interaction. So each of these sites (and many more) open accounts on each other's sites, funding them largely evenly, and develop a means of automated communication that allows the others to identify addresses that belong to members. So when a member of A.com wishes to send 50 bitcoin to B.net to fund a game for some time, A.com can tell (without the bitcoin network) that the address used to fund said account is tied to B.net, and can 'credit' the account by reducing the member's A.com account by 50, increasing B.net's account (at A.com) by 50, and then notifying B.net that said 'credit' has occurred. Given large enough sites, most of the transactions will tend to balance out, and only rarely will the sites have to 'normalize' their agreements using the Bitcoin network. This saves the sites, and by proxy their members, the associated costs of transactions on the Bitcoin network; and therefore reducing the costs of transactions for
all Bitcoin users.
And this is how microtransactions can still occur using Bitcoin even when the cost of transactions are no longer free.