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 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.