Eurogamer is report­ing that Jim Crow­ley of Tur­bine has dis­cussed plans for a social net­work­ing site based upon LotRO at the Tokyo Game Show. This site would be sim­i­lar in nature to Face­book or MySpace, but be directly con­nected to the game itself.

While Eurogamer didn’t pro­vide any screen­shots, Crow­ley did show off a site. Whether it’s a work­ing ver­sion or sim­ply a mockup is unclear, but the site included char­ac­ter pro­files, friends lists, video shar­ing fea­tures and other infor­ma­tion from the game.

The site will launch at the end of Quar­ter 4 for this year. I think the hope is the end of 2008, but if Crow­ley is talk­ing fis­cal quar­ters then there’s some chance that this won’t appear until some­time in the win­ter of 2009. We’ll see.

Beyond offer­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion and a way for fans to inter­act out­side of the game, Crow­ley also sees this as a ben­e­fi­cial adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­nity. It allows for MMORPG mak­ers to acquire some extra rev­enue through adver­tise­ments on the site, whereas they’d be com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate within the game. I’m fine with that, as long as none of them fly around or scream at me.

Per­son­ally I think some­thing of this nature is des­per­ately needed in LotRO. The char­ac­ter sig­na­ture cre­ator was the first step, but more really needed to be done. I think a big hur­dle for the game has been the fact that absolutely noth­ing from it is able to be used else­where. By com­par­i­son, World of War­craft play­ers are able to show off their char­ac­ter stats, look at the offi­cial Armory and so forth. I hope it gets to this point, but I sup­pose even a Tur­bine con­trolled method of doing this would be bet­ter than the cur­rent setup.

Appar­ently they’ll also plan­ning these func­tions for Dun­geons and Drag­ons Online and Asheron’s Call, both of which will see their own sites a lit­tle later on.

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