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Turbine Lands $30 Million in Venture Capital
Gamasutra has word that MMOG maker Turbine, developer of AC, AC2, DDO, and MEO, has succeeded in raising another round of venture capital for current and future projects. From the article: "The company has recently been strengthening its publishing and rights hold on its internally-developed products. It assumed complete control of development and publishing on Middle Earth Online, after finalizing a deal with Tolkien Enterprises and VU Games, and also took full control of Asheron's Call from Microsoft following the company's first round of financing. Of Turbine's major new MMO worlds, Dungeons & Dragons Online is due to launch later in 2005, and The Lord Of The Rings: Middle Earth Online will launch some time in 2006."
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I'm not so sure how Turbine managed to get so much funding, given how Ascheron's Call 2 has a pretty dismal showing in the MMORPG market -- if you take a look at the the lastest MMORPG charts, you can see that although Ascheron's Call 1 peaked at 120,000 subscribers, Ascheron's Call 2 only peaked at ~50,000 subscribers, and dropped precipitously after May 2003.
Just as my two cents, I'd prefer to see funding go to the makers of Anarchy Online, Planetside, or Eve Online, which are also indie, but have a much better subscriber base & track record.
Planetside was and is a Sony Online Entertainment production.
As for Turbine, the real question to ask isn't how many subscribers did the game have, but what was the return on investment for the game? We know that games like WoW and EQ make money hand over fist, and that the bulk of their expenses in the long term roughly scale with the number of users (there may be an economy of scale at work, making a large number of subscribers even more profitable, though). MMOGs also have an advantage over non-served games: if the long-term income for a MMOG from subscriptions is high enough, it can even make up for a shortfall in game box sales, if the servers are kept running long enough. Non-served games can't do that - if the game flops, the company loses money because the box sales didn't offset the initial production costs.
This brings up another thought - that for all those companies that went under because of the very rough seas in the games industry, at least a few of them could have been saved, and could have made those games they always wanted to make (and on their own terms, too) if they just have a running MMOG in their portfolio to ensure long-term company profitability.
In any case, I'm glad to see Turbine taking steps to make itself less dependent on its publisher(s). Internet distribution is another important (perhaps the next for Turbine?) step in making one's game development company self-sufficient.
I don't know how Turbine does it. That's like their 3rd or 4th round of VC funding for the company, and AC1 and AC2 were mediocre at best. I agree that DDO and LotRO are powerful franchises, but if someone gave a company like Playnet (makers of WWII Online) that much money they could go out and buy the rights to make games based on powerful franchises, too.
Bruce