GDCO 2010: LotRO's revenues double as Turbine lays out a promising future

by Justin Olivetti on Oct 8th 2010 10:00AM

Fantasy, Podcasts, Lord of the Rings Online, Events, real-world, Interviews, MMO industry, Free-to-play

According to Turbine, it's been a bonanza month for Middle-earth. At GDCO, the studio announced that revenues from Lord of the Rings Online have doubled in the past month since switching to a free-to-play hybrid model. What's even better is that Joystiq reports that LotRO has added a whopping million new accounts over these 30 days as well. Turbine is monitoring the server loads and have additional servers waiting if needed. It turns out that the F2P launch was even bigger than the original launch of LotRO back in 2007.

The good news doesn't stop there, either; LotRO has seen 20% of previous subscribers return, three times the numbers of concurrent players at peak times, and over half of the players using the hotly debated LotRO store for a purchase. Speaking of the store, the top-selling item has been an increase in shared storage, followed by tomes (stat boosters), the riding skill, and the Mines of Moria expansion.

Looking forward to the future, LOTRO Weekly wrote a summary of Massive Online Gamer's first podcast in which the Turbine devs outlined a few of the goodies in store for players in coming months. They are hoping to roll out updates every two to three months in a similar fashion to DDO's schedule, but are still committed to big expansions such as next year's Isengard. A new multi-boss raid is slated for early 2011, about the same time that the Radiance mechanic will be vanquished from the game forever.

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Reader Comments (23)

I am a new player in lotro and absolutely loving the game. I played in open beta, but at the time I was playing eve, which has a funny way of warping your perspective on games. Needless to say I passed it off as a wow clone. Since then I have played wow and boy was I wrong about that!

I am really glad they changed the model when they did, giving my a chance to try the game. It will definitely be my main game for a long time to come.

I recently went back into game, especially as they reinstated my founder's sub rate of 9.99 a month woot :)

I can assuredly say that the servers that I have played on (Nimrodel and Brandywine) have tons of players.... being in the teens or twenties is close, not quite there but very very close, to what it was like back at launch.

As a VIP, for the most part, can barely tell that there is a cash shop except when the Turbine dialogues try to force you there lol. After a couple of weeks worth of play I am closing in on being able to buy the last expansion... with turbine points! Woot! :)

Did the numbers of people that bought stuff with Turbine Points include people that only spent "free" ones you get doing deeds, or people who bought points with cash?

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