Free Middle Earth: LOTRO loses subscription, gains players

Last year, Turbine did an experiment, taking the previously subscription-based Dungeons and Dragons Online and adding a free-to-play option. The result was an almost immediate success. More players joined the game, revenues increased, and subscription numbers even rose. So this past September Turbine did the same thing with Lord of the Rings Online, adding a free option to an already successful subscription game.

Ars spoke with several members of the LOTRO team to see just how things are going two months after the change.

“It’s still fairly early, but we’ve had a really successful start,” Adam Mersky, Turbine’s director of communications, told Ars. “We’ve had over a million new registered users come into the game and our monthly revenue has doubled. We’re only six weeks in, but basically we’re making twice as much a month now than before when we could only make it off subscription revenue.”

The game is set up in a similar way to DDO. Players can still subscribe, but there’s now also a free-to-play option, coupled with a brand-new LOTRO store. Here, players can buy everything from additional quests and expansions to new clothes and even skill buffs, or tomes, as they’re called in the game. And players, both free and subscribers, have flocked to the store. “We’re having over half our (player) base use the store, that’s almost four times the industry average,” said Mersky.

The most popular premium content purchased by subscribers is additional storage space, but amongst both groups of players the horses have been extremely popular. And this has actually changed the way the game is played in some ways. Prior to the new payment model, the only way to get access to a horse and the skills necessary to ride it was to play the game for a hundred hours or so, complete a 30-minute riding quest, and then pay a whole bunch of gold. But with the introduction of the store, players can now simply purchase a horse and riding skills, saving them quite a bit of time. Changes like this take content that previously most players wouldn’t even see, and make it easily accessible to everybody.

Keeping everybody happy

One of the biggest challenges for Turbine has been making the free portion of the game substantial enough to keep the free players happy, without giving too much of the game away for nothing.

“Unfortunately it’s not a charity and we can’t give it away all for free, so we focused on making sure that the free experience was really strong and felt good,” producer Kate Paiz told Ars. “But where we could—options, inventory, things like that—we trimmed off a little bit on the edge to save us some on the back end and then allowed players who really wanted to participate in that content to have it available for a reasonable price,”

To that end, several aspects of the game have been changed since September based on player feedback. For instance, whereas free players originally only had access to one character slot, they now have two. And while free players at first lacked access to the expansion pack content, they can now experience the quests that pertain to the main storyline, while optional side-quests remain as premium content. According to Mersky, these changes were possible because Turbine was “conservative” with its initial pricing structure.

“It’s obviously easier to put more gates up and take them away than the alternative, whereas if you put free stuff in and then decide to charge for it that’s clearly not the way to go,” he told Ars. “It gives us a lot of flexibility to adjust based on player feedback.”