Can LotRO Eventually Become Second Only To WoW? Turbine Thinks So!

Speaking in an exclusive interview with Eurogamer, Jeffery Steefel believes that Turbine/Codemasters love-child  Lord of the Rings Online is the only MMO out there at present that could hope to achieve the same sort of mass-market success like World of Warcraft.

The game’s executive producer feels that eventually the game could become second only to WoW, but that they have a ways to go:

“There’s another level of success, which is reaching a certain mass-market critical mass, which to be totally fair, only Blizzard has achieved completely so far. We think that we are the game that has the most likelihood of being the second to do that, but we’re not there yet.”

I would love to be able to provide you with a number of players so that we could all get an idea of just how many subscribers the game actually has, but Turbine does not publicize figures of that sort. They do however admit that the Tolkien based game is turning a profit and is growing in numbers. Whatever their profits are, I personally do not know, but as someone who plays the game, I have seen a recent surge in the amount of new players on my server, so I can easily believe that the amount of people defecting to the game is indeed getting larger.

However, to maintain subscriber levels and to gain fresh blood you have to offer something other than your typical subscription model.  If you want your game to continue for many years to come, you have to offer a variety of ways to coerce the player to spend a monthly fee  – which is exactly how Steefel feels as well:

“This is a franchise that’s going to continue for years and years and years, and there’s no way that the singular, monolithic, $14.95 a month subscription model is going to last for years and years and years all by itself… it has to change.”

Steefel then went on to talk about the new game for the console that Turbine is currently working on which will be an extension of LotRO apparently, but that because of extensive elements in the MMO it would be hard to bring a full-fledged game like this to a box sitting on the floor in your living room:

“Consoles only have a certain number of buttons, so how do you help someone use a console controller to manage inventory and skills and traits and deeds and crafting items and all that stuff in a way that’s not just painful”

Codemasters is having a Mines of Moria event on September 23 and I will be there front row center, so hopefully I will be able to find out a little more on what else they are working on besides the upcoming expansion to LotRO. Meanwhile, you can read the full inteview with Jeffery Steefel over on Eurogamer where he also talks a bit about “the potential of two players co-operating on one machine in a persistent world”, if that sort of thing interests you.

(image courtsey of Fantasy Magazine)