Warner Bros. Acquires Turbine 57
NNUfergs writes with news that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired Turbine Inc., creators of Lord of the Rings Online, Asheron's Call, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Terms were not disclosed, but the Boston Globe claims the price was somewhere around $160 million.
"Warner Bros. Interactive has bought a number of game development houses in recent years, in a bid to become a major power in video gaming. In 2007, the company purchased TT Games, a British firm that develops family-friendly products like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. In 2009, Warner Bros. bought the assets of bankrupt Chicago game company Midway, maker of the popular Mortal Kombat games. And earlier this year, it acquired a majority stake in Rocksteady Studios, another British developer, which created the hit game Batman: Arkham Asylum. ... Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels. Turbine holds an exclusive license to make an Internet-based game based on the books, while last year, Warner Bros. won a license to make non-Internet-based Tolkien video games."
There goes the neighborhood (Score:2, Insightful)
D@#%... and I enjoyed playing D&D Online. Once WB gets control, you just know that the cost is going to go up (from base free), and the quality will go to #33L.
Meanwhile, Asheron's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
Is going to get the fucking shaft, just you watch. Since it has nothing to do with Tolkien it's going to get canned.
But hey I can dream right? Maybe they'll pour money into it and put out an expansion and merge some servers right? ...Right? :*(
Re:Why I love DDO (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, if a full blown warrior with a bow and axe comes by some random dude "Got any work for me?" it is FAR more likely to be something like "Nice axe you got there, I need someone to chop me some firewood." or "Any good with that bow? I'd pay good money for some pelts" than "I need you to on a sacred quest for the Sword of Doom in the haunted castle of Skul-Ugir". Realism is not very desirable in an RPG.
Atari (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they do better with Turbine than they did with Atari.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
What was stopping you before? The exorbitant cost of free? The days and days of downloading (Turbine's tiered download can have you up and playing DDO or LOTRO in an hour or two)? Your enjoyment of spending 45 minutes to cross a continent for one quest or drop? An unnatural desire to collect ten of something and turn it in (rare, but not unheard of in DDO)?
I've played nearly every MMO out there, either in beta, or as a subscriber, or on a trial. DDO does a few things differently (real-time twitch combat normalized for your character level, instanced dungeons for all quests and "adventure areas"), and it's worth a look for that alone. If you're a loner, it's become a functional game with the addition of hirelings and Solo difficulty. (It used to be somewhere between "eh" and unbearable solo.) If you can find a good group that isn't going to zerg rush every dungeon and is willing to let you read the text and let you enjoy the story, it's truly a sublime experience.
Warner Bros. isn't all Looney Tunes, and even if it were, you got a problem with Looney Tunes? I promise you, the kids at your school won't make fun of you for playing something from WB, and if they do, remind them that WB also makes things like The Matrix. (The two rumored "sequels" of this fine film are figments of your imagination - malicious code inserted into the Matrix to degrade your understanding of your place in it.)
If you hate DDO, you're out zero dollars and about as much time as it takes to watch whatever derivative schlock Hollywood's cranking out this month. If you love it, you set your subscription price (nothing, buy-what-you-want or all-you-can-conquer) and have at it. Either way, unless you're willing to cop to COMPLETE publisher zealotry (Sony, after the rootkit incident, does not get a DIME of my money, but I'll still kick around FreeRealms), you risk so little by trying it, it's objectively stupid not to. :)
Hold your horses (Score:1, Insightful)
Turbine is not becoming a Tolkien studio, the article just mentions the side-effect of this deal making them the sole proprietor of Lord of the Rings media.
Nothing will happen to Asherons Call. It's still going, and will continue to do so, just like DDO will not increase their prices (as a commenter above mentioned).
All this does is give Turbine more revenue to play with and more potential options for future projects.