Turine to Launch MMO Social Gaming Network By Year’s End
By Stephany on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 11:47 AM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Gamer Life, Games Industry, Lord of the Rings
Jim Crowley, Turbine’s president and CEO, revealed some interesting news this morning at the Tokyo Game Show that should get Lord of the Rings Online players pretty excited. Apparently, the company plans on adding social a networking site to the MMORPG by years end that will be reminiscent of MySpace and Facebook and connected to the online world.
Not only will gamers be able to display full character profiles and upload other gaming data from LOTRO, but they will also have the ability to add friends, view live news feeds, and share videos via a YouTube style feature.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Crowley described the new tool as “a version of Facebook or MySpace that sits directly on top of the gaming world. This is a fully-featured, rich, robust social network. It has every single feature that you would find in the major commercial social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.”
Fully expected to launch by the end of the year, Crowely feels that MMOs are in a position to integrate “web-literate” players into a Web 2.0 network attached to the games, and that Turbine’s other online games Dungeons & Dragons Online and Asheron’s Call will also be able to get in on the networking come late 2008 or during 2009. This would eventually make Turbine more money as well by “extending the lifetime value of the customer and driving “viral customer acquisition” by getting gamers more involved in the online world they are paying a monthly fee for.
“Turbine believes that a closed eco-system will have to become an open eco-system. The MMO needs to learn… to adapt itself to the ‘born digital’ generation. The MMO needs to step out of its shell and start reaching a much broader and deeper audience.”
He went on to elaborate that this is a great opportunity for developers to take advantage of advertising without ruining the games by riddling them with product placements.
“It allows you to inject advertising in a way that’s not in conflict with the game world,” he said. “It’s natural to it, something you see across the web 2.0 space.”
This is great news for players who want to socialize with their Kinships or other online friends in a more in-depth way than just going on grinding missions together. From a personal standpoint, it would be fun to be able to delve deeper into my character and show off some of the cool things I have accomplished that you just cannot see when inspecting an online character; plus it would be nice if you can sign in to the network without signing into the game as well. That way, you can check on your friends’ progress from your mobile without having to be near the computer your game is installed on. Maybe in the future, gaming companies will find a way to integrate all MMOs into one social network so that others can stay up to date on all of your online characters – not just one specific game.
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this search engine for social networks.