Turbine Comments on Applying DDO’s New Model to LotRO

Tony posted this on June 10th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
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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.

DDO Goes Hybrid

Tony posted this on June 9th, 2009. It has 2 Comments »
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A while back, we reported that Tur­bine was look­ing to hire a man­ager for micro­trans­ac­tions. A lot of us won­dered what this meant. Would exist­ing games be affected? Would this only affect upcom­ing titles? Most impor­tantly for us, what is the effect on LotRO?

I sup­pose we still don’t know the full answer to that last ques­tion, although Tur­bine has said they have no cur­rent plans for that.

The first two have been answered today with the announce­ment of Dun­geons and Drag­ons mov­ing over to a hybrid model. The game will offer both paid and free accounts. Paid accounts get addi­tional fea­tures (and 500 Tur­bine Points to spend on items), while free accounts are more lim­ited. The sys­tem is now in its beta stages and can be signed up for here. I’ve pasted in some basic notes for you:

  • Free means Free! – Players down­load and play DDO Unlim­ited for free by vis­it­ing www​.ddo​.com and within min­utes can be explor­ing a rich, beau­ti­ful and dan­ger­ous online world crawl­ing with leg­endary mon­sters, glo­ri­ous trea­sures, devi­ous traps, mind-bending puz­zles and end­less adven­tures from the world’s best known RPG. There is no time limit or level cap on free play.
  • Visit the new DDO Store!  — The DDO Store is loaded with hun­dreds of con­ve­nience items as well as pre­mium dun­geon packs, addi­tional char­ac­ter slots, hirelings (hired mus­cle), potions, char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion and more! The DDO Store is seam­lessly inte­grated into the game play and lets the player iden­tify new and excit­ing ways to enhance and cus­tomize their experience.
  • Be a DDO VIP! – Players who elect to sub­scribe to DDO Unlim­ited will have unlim­ited access to every pre­mium adven­ture pack, receive pri­or­ity server access, 10 char­ac­ter slots, a shared bank slot, and a monthly allot­ment of 500 Tur­bine Points to spend in the new DDO Store.

Obvi­ously this isn’t totally LotRO related, but I think it is an impor­tant announce­ment. I can see some peo­ple feel­ing that this makes real money trans­ac­tions less likely in LotRO and oth­ers feel­ing it makes them more likely. I think the thing that’s impor­tant to remem­ber here is that DDO has been sig­nif­i­cantly less suc­cess­ful than LotRO and has sig­nif­i­cantly less servers. I think this allows Tur­bine to pump some new blood into the title, which com­pa­ra­bly speak­ing is some­thing LotRO doesn’t need.

All I know is that I’ll be play­ing free DDO when it’s com­monly avail­able. :-o

More Fodder for LotRO on the Xbox 360

Tony posted this on May 14th, 2009. It has 4 Comments »
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dlc_price

LotRO hit­ting con­soles is a rumor that just won’t die. I sup­pose the nat­ural assump­tion is that this means it’s likely true. Gamedaily has infor­ma­tion on a sur­vey with ques­tions that are themed around a Xbox 360 vari­a­tion of Lord of the Rings Online. Ques­tions from the sur­vey dis­cuss a $12.99 monthly sub­scrip­tion fee as well as microtransactions.

These ques­tions and the game itself are all hypo­thet­i­cal. I’ve taken enough of these sur­veys to real­ize that most of the time, noth­ing within the sur­vey winds up being 100% accu­rate. It’s gen­er­ally just a way to phrase things that sound inter­est­ing to the per­son tak­ing the sur­vey, while still simul­ta­ne­ously find­ing out about their gen­eral interests.

Still, Tur­bine is obvi­ously work­ing on some­thing and at this point I would be sur­prised if it wasn’t LotRO related. Even if LotRO appeared on the Xbox 360 in an inter­est­ing way and even if it was a VERY dif­fer­ent game, I’m def­i­nitely not inter­ested in pay­ing any sub­scrip­tion fees.

I sup­pose we’ll see what hap­pens. E3 isn’t far away.

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Microtransactions Confimed to Be For a Future, Unnanounced Project

Tony posted this on January 5th, 2009. It has No Comments »
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riot

Recently there was word that Tur­bine was hir­ing for a Micro­trans­ac­tion and e-Commerce Man­ager. Obvi­ously this news has con­cerned quite a few peo­ple; it’s nat­ural to assume that some­thing of this nature would have an effect on Turbine’s cur­rent titles.

How­ever, Sapi­ence of Tur­bine has con­firmed that this posi­tion is for a future, unan­nounced title.

Hey guys! We know the recent job list­ing has caused a bit of a stir, but please be aware that this post­ing is for an unan­nounced future project. We appre­ci­ate the thoughts and feed­back on both sides thus far.

I was spec­u­lat­ing that it was likely for a new title (par­tic­u­larly on the con­sole side) the other day since I felt it made the most sense. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what this project turns out to be.

I assume this doesn’t rule out the pos­si­bil­ity that some day LotRO might try this sys­tem out as well .… But as of right now it doesn’t look likely and appar­ently isn’t part of their plan.

Yay!

Turbine Considering Microtransactions?

Tony posted this on January 1st, 2009. It has 6 Comments »
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cash-register

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.