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LotRO is free, yet rakes in the big bucks?

​It seems counterintuitive that providing something for nothing would be a good way to do business but, for developer Turbine, free-to-play lightning appears to have struck twice.

 

A year ago, Turbine introduced the world to its free-to-play model for Dungeons and Dragons Online. In just twelve months, the game's user base and year-to-year earnings skyrocketed.

 

Turbine introduced the same model to their other online massive multiplayer game, Lord of the Rings Online, and, after just one month, it looks as though LotRO is set to be another smashing success for the company.

With World of Warcraft dominating the MMO landscape, it has become increasingly difficult for most games of the same ilk to garner much of a following. When you have to pay around $15 a month to play these sorts of titles, why wouldn't you go with the most popular of the lot?

 

The free-to-play (f2p) model bypasses this initial hurdle of paying to try a game out by offering players the chance to experience much of a game's content without ever having to pay for it. While a subscription plan is still available and offers unrestricted access to all of the game's content, the f2p model allows any player to pour dozens of hours into the title without the need to fork over cash on a monthly basis.

 

So how can you make money off such a model? The answer is microtransactions and the ability to try before you buy. While many players may have never given LotRO a second look before, the ability to play the game for free has brought new gamers to the digital world of Tolkien's novels in droves. Once they've seen what the game has to offer, many of those gamers decide opening the game up fully is worth a monthly fee and then become subscribers.

 

​For those who choose not to go the subscription route, however, the Turbine store offers all sorts of additional content, items and quests for players to pick up for small amounts of real-world money in an ala carte fashion. Players who would have never spent a penny on the title are now dropping five dollars here, ten dollars there in order to get quick access to a mount, have an easier night of questing or pick up some additional missions.

 

In short, f2p has meant more players and more earnings for Turbine. At a recent Game Developer's Conference panel, Turbine producer Kate Paiz showed off some of LotRO's player and earnings statistics. While the game only went f2p a month ago, Paiz said the results have been extremely positive for the company.

 

In just four weeks, revenue for LotRO has doubled while more than a million player accounts have been added, effectively expanding the game's community by about 400 percent. More intriguing is the fact about 20 percent of LotRO's former players have actually made a return to the game, perhaps drawn in by a revitalized popularity that has actually outperformed the game's initial launch.

 

What makes this whole system work is the fact that, of all those players, more than 50 percent of them have already purchased items from the Turbine store, not to mention those who have gone ahead and become full-fledged subscribers.

 

It will be interesting to see how LotRO is holding up after a full year under this new model but, with Turbine promising continued content updates and an evolving online store with more and more options available as small purchases, chances are they've got another huge success on their hands.