Some­times it’s easy for me to for­get that LotRO isn’t truly a “world­wide” game just yet. It’s still expand­ing even now, with Rus­sia and South Korea being the most recent addi­tions. In some senses I think this is a good thing; the game appears to be pretty healthy con­sid­er­ing all of the mar­kets it hasn’t entered yet.

Tur­bine has appar­ently teamed up with CDC Games to release the title in China, accord­ing to LotRO­Life (via a press release on Earth Times). CDC Games will be the MMORPG’s exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tor in the coun­try. As you might expect, both par­ties are  excited about this: CDC has 13 mil­lion active users for the games it cur­rently han­dles and expects LotRO to get a piece of that. Here’s a bit from the release:

“CDC Games and Tur­bine have been strong and trusted part­ners through the process of local­iz­ing the game and adding major new con­tent to appeal to the dis­tinc­tive China mar­ket,” said Mon­ish Bahl, CFO of CDC Games. “We feel the esti­mated tim­ing of this launch is a good oppor­tu­nity in light of the cur­rent com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment in China, espe­cially with the recent sit­u­a­tion of cer­tain pop­u­lar for­eign titles of this genre. The closed beta test results for the game also are very encour­ag­ing evi­dence of the poten­tial this game holds in the China mar­ket and we look for­ward to a com­mer­cial launch in the near future.

An exact release is not yet announced, but CDC is aim­ing for the “sec­ond half” of 2009. Con­sid­er­ing we’re already in that, I sup­pose it’s anyone’s guess as to when this might hap­pen. My assump­tion would be closer to the end of the cal­en­dar year.