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LotR Online's Free-To-Play Switch Tripled Revenue
Last June, Turbine made the decision to switch Lord of the Rings Online from a subscription-based business model to a free-to-play model supported by microtransactions. In a podcast interview with Ten Ton Hammer, Turbine executives revealed that the switch has gone well for the company, with game revenues roughly tripling. The active player base has also grown significantly in that time. Executive Producer Kate Paiz said, "This really echoes a lot of what we've seen throughout the entertainment industry in general. It's really about letting players make their choices about how they play."
Yes, allowing people to actually pay (and play) when they want to, and not be forced to feel like they HAVE to get their money's worth with a subscription system, is proven to be better for both the gamer AND the company.
I quit a long time ago when it was a subscription plan, and the switch drew me back fairly quickly. I think I'll be subbing again as well. I fully appreciate Turbines move in this - the flexibility is very nice.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Out of curiosity, did that make the game "profitable?" I mean, three times zero is still zero. Does the game now bring in enough revenue to justify its continued existence?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
When this show started 10 years ago the amount of servers for a 1000 person "shard" was measured in racks, by the end of this decade I would not be surprised to see 1000 person servers on a single blade.
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Gross doesn't equal net. Operating costs went up substantially as well and most of the money they made was from an influx of players that came in and bought things in game, like quest packs and such... Most of which is permanent so they will not continue to purchase more unless they make more. They basically resold a game that had already been made to players that had already purchased it but no longer wanted to pay a monthly fee. Once those players have bought up all that content (again) they are done spending money unless Turbine generates a lot more content. I'll give them credit, their free to play model is the best one out yet... but they certainly didn't triple their profits.
Without some dollars to measure, the words "tripiling" sounds fantastic. 3x a small number can still be a small number.
That's pretty much what Valve did with Team Fortress 2 - the product has been on sale so many times (via Steam) that they sold it just about everyone that owns a Steam account, then created the in-game store for players to buy items. Valve makes money, players get more options,and indie developers see a percentage of their custom creations. Play as you want, pay as you wish.
Thoughts:
3-4 times the number of players and most of them new == how much higher customer support cost?
How many people made one-time purchases during that time that allows them to do everything they want without paying for a monthly subscription ever again?
Which month compared to what? Turbine spent the year before f2p mostly on implementing f2p and very little was offered to make people resubscribe. It makes a big difference whether the 1/3rd is right before f2p (in the void so to speak) or whether it is during times where new content was provided on a regular basis.
Also, is this really month by month since September? And how much of it was caused by the huge 20% sale at the end of December that potentially allowed people to load up on "points" (the currency you later spend on game content and items) and live on them all year.
Last but not least if any of the above is true and revenue later drops, will we ever learn of it? It seems like dangerous one-sided information to rely on when deciding whether it is a good business model.
Eh, different people enjoy games differently. I used to play CoH long ago, but quit after I kept getting into XP debt up to my eyeballs that I finally said, "I'm paying for this?" Now if I'd had the opportunity to pay $5-10 for debt forgiveness, or some item that made the work of getting out of debt more fun/less time consuming than fighting henchman after henchman, I might have considered keeping my subscription.
s long as they can't buy something that can't be reasonably earned in game, I have no problem with that.
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Unfortunately they still want a month fee to play MonsterPlay which is the only truly unique thing about LoTRO! Rest of the game is just a restricted Tolkien setting. Sadly I stopped playing because Turbine never did any support, expansions or did any effort for Monsterplay. Once a year on April fools day you got to chase chicken players and splat them which was vastly amusing the first time. What other game can you play as a real monster (4 legged warg, 6 legged spider, etc) against other people?
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Precisely, there's been a fair number of games in recent times taking that approach. The ones which allowed access to content that couldn't be gotten without donating tended to fair poorly. The problem being that either the content was pointless and trivial or it ended up breaking the game for people that couldn't afford to pay. And if they have to pay in order to get the content in order to keep up, you may as well require that people play.
Turbine does cash-shops properly. I play DDO, but I hear LotR is the same: none of the items you can buy for cash are particularly useful in the end-game. The Korean MMOs are different: cash and plenty of it is the only way to be competitive in the end game. But that turns off most US players, and the Turbine games don't use that model.
At least in DDO, most of the utility items you can buy for cash don't work in raids. The equippable items you can buy are nice when your first character is level 3, but are basically vendor trash items (still, when you're just starting off, paying 50 cents for a +2 sword or whatever can be attractive, but no one will be impressed by it). The main thing people buy is content, just piecemeal instead of subscription-based: a dungeon here, a playable race there.
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I have to agree on the summary, and point out it's one of the reasons we (me and my girlfriend) stopped playing LOTRO. We're not hardcore players, never reached the max level with any characters (though our mains came close) and there were months when we played little or nothing. It just didn't feel right paying for. In fact, had our accounts not been so old as to have been deleted, we'd have taken it up again after it became F2P.
I think this also reveals a major problem of MMORPGs - the whole grinding means that you don't get out so easily (don't want to lose everything), but once you did, you're not likely to come back because you're not going to do it all over again. I know I won't.
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I'm actually pretty disappointed by LoTRO going F2P.
DDO (another Turbine game) was dying and had no choice but to make the switch, but LoTRO was (as far as I know) doing fine.
I was considering going back to LoTRO after a long break, but now that they've switched to the "kids with mommy's credit card rule supreme" method that's not going to happen.
I have no problem with games supported by microtransactions existing, but it's pretty tiresome to hear people go on and on about how it's the best MMO payment option since sliced bread.
I just want to throw my comment into the ring. I really hope they can get Asheron's Call on a free-to-play model. I think they've upped the price on it(from it's initial release at least) and it would be fun to explore Dereth at my will, rather than making the commitment to pay for it monthly.
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"This really echoes a lot of what we've seen throughout the entertainment industry in general. It's really about letting players make their choices about how they play." PAY or PLAY?
I may be being a pessimist, but I believe systems like this will eventually bust. All of the failure MMOs are switching to free-to-play with heavy game based influences being based on how much money you spend in game. I'm not completely familiar with LotRs model, but eventually you'll reach a point where people get tired of having to put in a quarter for continued play. The influx and increased revenue right now, at least in my opinion, is based on the fact that everyone is all googly about so many free things and most MMOs do have a decent amount of content you explore before you get tired of them. I'm sure given another year or two this will climax and people will start to realize they're getting milked for something that they don't really find worth the money (or at least feel it).
Putting that aside, while I'm not familiar with LotRs model, I am with other crappy MMO models where you need to buy items in order to stay on top. A lot of 3rd rate Korean MMOs are like this and I recently played Global Agenda in which you almost immediately run into the pay wall. I almost justified buying this with friends, but after looking at the benefits for the 'purchased version' vs the 'free version', I started to realize that there is almost nothing to the game and they just try to hide it with smoke and mirrors. In other words 'if you buy this, the game will be so much better!' when really you already played the best parts of the game, sorta like a movie trailer.
Maybe I'm just putting too much faith in consumers to eventually figure things out or get a little inkling in their head that says 'danger will robinson'.
Obviously, this is the opposite of Warcraft, which is monthly subscriptions, but that also lets you buy a variety of microtransactions. The other game I play routinely is Valve's Team Fortress 2 via Steam, which has no monthly fee, but has a ridiculous array of little extras and add-ons and play-changing toys you can buy for extra cash when you feel like it--but you don't need even one.
How does LotR compare versus those?
Dude, where's my packet?
Or sweeties as us Brits call them.
Anyway, go free, get mass publicity, get 10x as many players, hook them in and when they're at their weakest offer them cheap ways to get whatever they want in game.
What I'd be curious about is the extent to which this has changed player demographics.
Back when I was playing LotRO, one of the primary attractions was that the average player was several years older than on WoW and similar subscription-based MMOs (something in the early 30's, according to Turbine folks at Austin GDC). This had a significant effect: a whole lot less of the trash-talking and harassment that tends to come with younger playerbases. Free-to-play games such as Runescape tend to attract younger people (primarily for economic reasons), but with that comes more behavioral problems.
Can folks who have been through the change tell me whether the free-to-play model has brought a change in the "character" of the playerbase? I might want to come back, but not if the primary attraction (a serious, literary playerbase who are there for the backstory and setting) is now a "u r teh g@y" pit.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
You seem to be misunderstanding the way this works. Sure, Turbine sells database entries for cash, but mostly they sell piecewise access to the content that subscribers get. You can pay $15/month, or $5/dungeon. That really is about letting players make chocies about how they pay/play. This seems to work pretty well in practice - lots of younger players buy content $5 here and $10 there as they have a little money, but they can keep replaying old content in the meantime and keep the social aspect of the game going.
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to get all your characters mounts instead of buying them with real money. You can also use this trick to get all your bags too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"Bare" with you? But I hardly know you!
That's one of the really nice things about the LotRO store. The store does not sell "gear" in the sense of gear that will help you in-game.
:)
You can buy lots of cosmetic stuff. You can buy a couple trait levels. You can buy some of the bonus books which improve your stats (but if you play any fellowship instances, you're going to get those anyway).
There really is very little in the store that could be considered giving you an edge or even equaling a player who does not.
They've done, IMO, an excellent job of this balancing act.
A lot of what folks end up forking cash over for things like bank vault space, shared space, wardrobe space, character slots, warden/rune-keeper classes, mounts, and some nice things like "double count for slayer deeds" which is a varying length buff that lets you get 2x the kills for slayer deeds.
At any rate, I'm completely enamored with the idea that Turbine is really doing well with this model as it means I'll get to keep playing more LotRO!
Guild Wars doesn't really push MicroTransactions like most such games do though. There's no item shop, and almost all the additional purchases are once per account. The only ones that aren't are character re-customizations.
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... so?
I play Dungeons and Dragons Online, the first game from Turbine to go free to play under the same system. I think it's been successful because you get a tiny bit of the in game store currency just by playing the game. That means you get used to buying items out of the paid store instead of outright boycotting it and being dead set against giving them any money. Also, they provided massive benefits permanently to players who bought their store currency from them once. It's only $6.50 minimum and I believe LOTRO is the same and then tada, you get massive benefits for life. So once you've got your credit card on file or got someone else to lend you their paypal account, they assume you'd do it again. Then of course there's the people who buy like $100/month in store currency because they're horribly rich and I hear that's what drives any game like this.
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Actually Guild Wars proves that the entire Item Mall or subscription model for mmorpg's is a scam. ArenaNet was making a steady profit off GW and it's expansions without relying on micro-transactions or subscriptions. Just buying the games for $50 is plenty of money to run the servers. Subscription fees are a scam that people bought into when mmorpgs and the companies continue to use because people aren't smart enough to see through them.
Fair enough. I almost did not post anything here because I could see that I was not knowledgeable enough about that MMOs pay model to really say anything of value. But I've got karma to burn so screw it heh.
On a side note, where was your sig for 8 years when we went from a federal surplus to a deficit?
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
On a side note, where was your sig for 8 years when we went from a federal surplus to a deficit?
I hadn't realized, quantitatively, just how bad things were. But the past two years have been brutal - the debt has increased more under two years of Obama than it did under 8 years of Bush (not that the president really has all that much to do with it, it's just a convenient lable for the timeframe). This isn't a problem that a president can fix - we the voters need to realize that even though government program X may be a good idea in principle, we're out of money, and nearly out of borrowed money.
Our obligations to future retirees exceed $1M per taxpayer more than we have money for - we cannot possibly make good on those promises, the question is whether we wind down programs gracefully giving people time to make other plans, or ignore the problem until things actually start to collapse, as the PIIGS have done.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's a game. We're not talking about food or education or something. Luxury goods are exactly the kinds of goods that ought to be distributed via free markets. The "financially underprivileged" will probably be better off without addicting video games anyway ...