Mas­sively has an inter­est­ing inter­view up with Tur­bine con­cern­ing Dun­geons and Drag­ons Online’s sub­scrip­tion model changes.

There’s a ques­tion posed by Mas­sively as to whether or not we can expect sim­i­lar changes to LotRO or even Asheron’s Call. Adam Mer­sky, Turbine’s Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, was the one to answer this spe­cific ques­tion. I’ve under­lined cer­tain por­tions for emphasis.

Are there any plans to imple­ment this busi­ness model for LotRO or Asheron’s Call?

Adam: Not really. In bring­ing LotRO and DDO over to Asia over the past few years, the games we were com­pet­ing against over there were free-to-play games. So we saw the power of this model, know­ing that we needed to lead in this space, and we won­dered how we could do that. Do we port an exist­ing game? Do we make a new game? Then we looked at DDO and thought this game is pretty per­fect for this model. The style of game­play, with small group instanced expe­ri­ences, makes it easy for us to lock off and allow play­ers to pur­chase access as they need it. Where as LotRO is a much dif­fer­ent, open world with a tra­di­tional expe­ri­ence that doesn’t lend itself to this type of model.

And if you really go back to it, the way D&D was mar­keted in the 70s and 80s and even today, it was very much a micro­trans­ac­tion busi­ness, if you can do that in an offline busi­ness. But you had adven­tures that you played with your bud­dies and when you were ready for more, you headed down to the hobby store and bought more books, or you enhanced your expe­ri­ence with some­thing like new dice or minis or stuff like that. Lit­tle did we know when we started down this path awhile ago that right under our nose we had this game that was per­fect to start migrat­ing. We’ve been work­ing on this for well over a year, and we had to really go back and re-engineer the game to work under this model, but to answer your ques­tion, we have no plans to do this to LotRO because it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of game. Quite frankly, LotRO’s doing really well in its cur­rent situation.

This was my take on the sit­u­a­tion yes­ter­day, but it’s always nice to hear some­thing from a Tur­bine employee. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how this plays out .… I would have really liked to see such things hap­pen to other titles such as Tab­ula Rasa (which never really won me over, but did have promise that could have been exploited by a sub­scrip­tion model like this), but clearly a lot went into this change. I sup­pose not every pub­lisher and/or devel­oper would find it to be worth­while.

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