LotR Online's Free-To-Play Switch Tripled Revenue 91
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."
DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:DUH! (Score:5, Informative)
I had never previously paid any money to play an MMO before LotRO. I used to play Ultima Online, first as a free 1-month trial and then on free unoffical servers many years ago. I joined LotRO a few months ago because it was free to play, and I quickly became hooked. It is a very high-quality game and very fun to play. Yes, I admit it is very commercialized because there is a 'store' built right into the game, and you can purchase points to buy things in-game. These things include additional content, quests and such, items, and lots of other 'little' things that can make things more convenient and/or fun.
But the beauty of it is -- you don't need to purchase _anything_ from the store to play through the main quest line, or to go to any area in the game except the major expansons. You can also _earn_ points without paying real money for them, just by playing the game. So I could avoid a monthly fee altogether and just throw a couple of bucks at it if there's something I want, or I could earn it by playing. And the stuff you spend the points on does not really imbalance the game. Sure, you can level a little bit faster or you can fast-travel to distant lands a bit more easily, but it's not like the free players are at a huge disadvantage.
I played for about a month and then I purchased the big expansion for the game, Mines of Moria. You need to be level 45+ to really go to the expansion area, anyway.. So along with this expansion I got a 'free' month of 'VIP' access, which includes many of the perks you can purchase using the points system. I really liked having these things after my free trial expired, so I decided to continue my VIP access by paying $10/month. I still play this game every day, so why not? But if I ever start playing less frequently, I can completely stop paying any money and still reap the benefits that I have unlocked already. That, to me, is really awesome. If this were WoW, if I stopped paying I could not play at all, period. It's a really ingenious system, IMO.
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Just out of curiousity, does the name "Mytharria" mean anything to you?
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It certainly does to me! I wasted several years of my life there. Hell, I could probably even blame it for flunking out of college the first time around. Heh. Still, if I could put mytharria.org,2593 in my login.cfg right now and start playing again, I would in a heartbeat. Believe it or not, I have an old mytharria.tgz that's been sitting on my hard drive for years (the file date says 12/25/2001) that's the entire POL run environment for the server at some point, I think the "Dawn's Rising". Don't ask me h
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*stab stab*
-- Qamos
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Hahah, wow, brings back memories. :D
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You can save money by subscribing one month (Score:2)
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.
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There's a reason that collecting many small payments spread over time will usually result in higher total revenue than getting one lump sump as a monthly subscription. It's the same reason that an "all-you-can-gamble" slot machine (e.g. penny slot machine but deposit $20, unlimited plays until you leave) would be much less profitable for casinos. They get you every time you need that one next thing.
It makes you feel like you can afford more, even though you end up paying more in the long run. And it's becom
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Also for the free players and non subscribers the whole purchasing system is presented very well. In the initial areas everything is unlocked, all quests are available and the main storyline is always available. Later on though you will start seeing little golden buttons and small messages saying you can buy so and so content whenever you encounter something locked. You can then simply rightclick the button/npc and it will open up the ingame browser and take you to the store where you can quickly and easily
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Yes, allowing people to actually pay per minute when they want to, and not be forced to feel like they HAVE to get their money's worth with a flatrate Internet connection, is proven to be better for both the gamer AND the company.
It's more the "the first shot is free" business model, what they make money on are the addicts who typically spend way, way much more than they would in a subscription system while the casuals get a free game. Kinda like going to Las Vegas to not gamble, they even give you "free" c
Worked for me (Score:2)
Meh (Score:1)
I'd say it shows that people like to be 'winners' even if they have to pay real money for it.
If I can obtain an item by reaching level X - or by paying $5 and showing off the item, then certain people will just cough up.
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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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Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
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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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 t
Is that good? (Score:2)
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It was never unprofitable.
Re:Is that good? (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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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)
The DDO switch to free-to-play happened well before the Warner buyout, and the profitability shown by that change is, I suspect, one of the things that made Warner think they were a good acquisition. The LotRO switch to F2P was just a follow-up, with the hopes that it would prove as profitable as the DDO switch had been.
Costs much less to maintain a MMORPG (Score:2)
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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Indeed.
I don't know why people assume running an MMO server would be so costly - the amount of RAM that goes into simply running the 3D engine for the Client can store a lot of relevant information for a server that doesn't have to render a thing.
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The load probably goes up a lot in a PvP MMO with collisions than in a PvE MMO without collisions. Also the need for low latency is higher in PvP (With PvE the client can predict monster movements more easily)
Re:Costs much less to maintain a MMORPG (Score:4, Interesting)
Missile Module Impact pt 1 [eveonline.com]
Missile Module Impact pt 2 [eveonline.com]
Fixing the Lag Blog Series [eveonline.com]
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
Seriously old news (Score:3, Interesting)
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Um, that's why the headline and summary say "REVENUE" and not "PROFIT." There is a difference. Unless you are a troll who made an ignorant post on purpose, you should know what words mean before you accuse the whole article of being a fraud.
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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.
That's not really true. The big advantage to the F2P model isn't forcing players to re-buy content, but rather to draw in new players. Which is exactly what's happening (at least in DDO - can't speak for LotRO since I don't play it). There are still plenty of "old-timers", a lot of whom still pay for "VIP" (subscription) status. But the number of new players outnumber the old-timers by at least 5 to 1. The F2P switch has allowed them to increase their player base substantially.
And in the case of DDO, a
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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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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.
"tripiling" what? (Score:1)
Without some dollars to measure, the words "tripiling" sounds fantastic. 3x a small number can still be a small number.
See: TF2 (Score:1)
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I haven't ever played it, but, sure enough, it is there in my account. It was very hard to skip it because Valve keeps shoving it into pretty much every "mega pack" they offer, and those tend to have very welcoming pricing, especially on holiday sales.
Questions... (Score:1)
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 d
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To my knowledge, Turbine states that free players don't get customer support; they can post on the forums, but can't use the customer support system.
VIP players (aka, those who pay a subscription fee) get full customer support, and Premium players (those who have paid Turbine for something related to the game, at any point) get support for 30 days past the last time they bought Turbine Points.
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PR Speak (Score:1)
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.
When I read this my BS alarm nearly knocked me off my chair. I get that when you are extracting money from people for data base entries, a very glib way of looking at it I know but bare with me here, you have to come up with some line of bs to mask that fact.
And I'm not trying to say that the guy has to be totally forthright. Further I know that people are indeed getting value for their dollar in terms of entertainment. But could he have said something that sounds a little less full of crap?
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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
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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?
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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 o
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LoTR free to play (Score:3, Interesting)
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That kept in me Everquest for one more month though - it's a blast at first. It's also a great idea for a different PvP model, where you don't need to do any grinding to play on the monster side (but also don't accumulate stuff).
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I believe they are reworking the monster play and making it f2p as well.
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What other game can you play as a real monster (4 legged warg, 6 legged spider, etc) against other people?
Minions of Mirth. So-so as a MMO, but there's free play for a limited levelcap, and a one-time fee for the full game.
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However they are opening up PvMP to everyone this year, and adding a new PvMP zone. It still won't be as good as any game that focuses on PvP though. Some players wish it would just be removed entirely. It can be fun now and then, but overall it is two completely separate communities and personality types.
agree (Score:2)
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 mean
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Your account was there, but the characters were not. But having said that, I quit playing in the spring of 2008 because I didn't have time (or money) for an MMO. When I came back for F2P, my accounts were still there (beta and release) with all of my characters on the production servers. I have since picked up copies of Moria ($10 ea) for both and upgraded to 5 char slots; with 5 bags, no gold cap, and mounts on all my characters. I also burnt off about 30k destiny points that I never bothered to use wh
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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.
That's why I quit EQOA Frontiers and Final Fantasy XI, I liked the games, but coudln't really devote a lot of time to them. I remember joining a guild in EQOA and getting kicked out when I wasn't leveling fast enough to help out guildmates. I couldn't really blame them either.
I even tried the WoW trial and liked it as well, but know I'd never be able to devote the time necessary to do the stuff other people think are "required" like spending hours every night raiding and whatnot.
I play the free FreeRealms
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Been tempted by the free DDO and LOTRO, but they don't have Linux clients.
Don't know about DDO but LOTRO is rated gold/platinum for Linux under Wine, if you've got moderate Linux skills it looks like a relatively small effort to get it working.
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Hm, then I have forgotten the login data and my e-mail and birthday have changed. :-)
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*sigh* (Score:1, Insightful)
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 opti
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Yeah, the main thing sold through the cash shop is the basic content. It's more "kids with mommy's credit card blow it all on hairstlyes and armor appearance kits" (I've seen that exact complaint on the forums, as anyone on the account can spend the points once you buy them).
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Except you are wrong, kids with mommy's credit card don't rule supreme, they just level faster. You can buy stat buffs but they're relatively worthless and can be earned in game. You can buy XP boosts, but all they do is count as rested XP, and the cost isn't really worth it. You can buy traits, except those can also be earned in game.
I was VIP and now I'm free to play because money is tight. The only perceptible difference I can see is that now I don't earn rested XP. I have a bunch of points they gave me
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Asheron's Call (Score:1)
Eventual Bust? (Score:1)
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 havi
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Warcraft & Team Fortress 2 (Score:2)
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?
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In that scale, LOTRO is more on the line of TF2, but it sits somewhere in the middle. The items provided are usually along the lines of buying a gun from the TF2 store. It helps save time, but doesn't cause balance issues for those that don't want to use the store. There are content packs that are only available for pay, so that's like valve releasing 1-2 new maps that only paying users can connect to. The concept doesn't work well in the TF2 sense because it would mean servers having to be distinguished ba
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It's the checkout candy model (Score:2)
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.
Change in playerbase demographics? (Score:3)
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.
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Well, for DDO (another freemium Turbine game), the demographics shifted a lot younger, as you might expect. However, it's a remarkably polite crowd, by MMO standards. I don't know why, but within a week you level out of the ""u r teh g@y" pit" (and you can earn or buy an option to start at level 4, making it take only a couple of nights to leave the annoying chat behind). I can't explain why the childishness is confined to just the starting levels, as it's not particularly difficult to level up. You cer
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The beginner zones in the game seem pretty mixed in terms of quality. In general you'll see a lot of young pukes that don't necessarily care about anything and run around acting like crud. I generally didn't have too much o f a problem with it, but occasionally I'd have to turn off global messages just to stop listening to a particularly inane conversation. Once you start to leave the beginner areas, the quality of the conversation and population seem to rise a lot. I suppose the kids that really have littl
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... so?
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why it really works (Score:1)