Turbine Buys Asheron's Call From Microsoft

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.

Comments

Let me be the first...

[krisbrowne42]

..to welcome this change, dragging what seemed to be an otherwise good game from the jaws of evil.. Now just port it to some other platforms so those of us who won't use a Wintendo can play it.

Good move

[xalres]

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.