Turbine has posted a new career for a microtransaction/e-commerce manager. The job involves managing in-game stores and enticing players to use them.
Massively seems to believe this is something that will be worked into existing games, although there are no real signs pointing to that currently. Turbine has admittedly talked about microtransactions in the future and apparently at least a few people there believe that the monthly fee system will not be sustainable forever. What anyone thinks this means means for their existing games is just a guess at this stage. The job listing itself doesn’t seem to imply anything one way or another.
Turbine is a growing company and, honestly, I think it would be stupid of them to not have someone in the company that understands in-game microtransactions. Understanding why people use them and why others do not is something that is going to be increasingly important as time goes on and bigger and bigger companies start considering this as a secondary option to the typical monthly subscription. Bioware’s move to a microtransaction system for their new Star Wars MMORPG is kind of laying down the gauntlet for this.
I imagine Turbine, like any company, also has a few other projects they’re working on that we’ve had no inkling of so far. Their supposed console project, for example, could be related to this as opposed to any existing game. Console gamers are historically not very interested in paying another fee for a MMORPG (particularly on the Xbox 360, as LIVE requires a fee as well). A microtransaction system could help Turbine combat that.
I guess we’ll see what happens. I, for one, am not really quick to jump to conclusions about what this means for LotRO. I know many people automatically expect the worse from such “revelations”, but for now I’m not very worried about it.
