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Turbine Buys Asheron's Call From Microsoft

Posted by simoniker on from the come-to-daddy dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to Turbine's announcement that they've purchased back the entire Asheron's Call MMO franchise from Microsoft. Turbine, the original developers of the titles, has just announced a large venture capital-sourced funding increase, and will now "assume all responsibility for Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2 game and player support, including customer service, tech support, quality assurance and a new billing system." Additionally, a letter from the content developers reveals that "we are going to be making an expansion pack for Asheron's Call 1", the still-popular franchise originator.

2 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Good move by xalres · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Quite a ballsy move on Turbine's part. There was speculation in the AC community as to whether or not the games (specifically AC2) were going to be shut down. By doing this, Turbine is not only showing their commitment to the franchise but they are also dumping the company that:

    - was responsible for four months of borked chat because they wanted to showcase their new .NET platform.

    - was responsible for the server disaster in Jan/Feb.

    - would not market the game!! Thus keeping the server populations dropping because of the first two problems.

    --
    If whales learn how to use weapons we're all screwed!
  2. Re:Interesting by Teh+Suq · · Score: 2, Insightful
    AC2 was a classic case of how not to launch an MMORPG. They launched an un-balanced, low content game with non-functional chat. Exit the design team.

    Enter the live team. Spent a year redesigning each and every class from the top down. Allowing every player to reset their character's class every month at no cost or effort (due to the redesigning going on). Wrestle control of the chat servers away from Microsoft thus getting chat working almost a year after launch. People quit in droves, who wants to pay for beta?

    Today, AC2 is a really good game and it is not much at all like the original game at launch. Too bad it now has one foot in the grave. Population at primetime is now hovering around 2000 total people and that is probably high.

    I expect that it can recover with a proper re-launch (AO could recover, why can't AC2?) but we will have to wait and see if they plan to do that. I've heard the products were pulled from the shelves for a "redesign" before this news came out. Now it may be clearer why this was happening.

    The $18M investment Turbine got from a VC group cannot hurt anything.