Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
- Gronk!
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It was never unprofitable.
That may be true, but if they were making a profit it was a tiny one. A good friend of mine works at Turbine, and things were very tight and not looking good for a long time. It sounds like they were very close to shutting down entirely when Warner Bros. bought them last year and brought a nice infusion of cash, which allowed them to try the free-to-play model that seems to be working out well (also allowed them to hire some new people and pay the bonuses and raises they had been going without for years).
Check out the EVE Dev Blogs for extremely detailed information on users, blades, racks, nodes, etc. They have some excellent data on how they balance users on a blade and how the action happening within drastically affects each blade.
Missile Module Impact pt 1
Missile Module Impact pt 2
Fixing the Lag Blog Series
Lots of really interesting in depth information about how the code works, the tools they use for finding problems within the code, how their servers are configured, etc. Great read from a technical point of view