Hybrid Models: Free-to-Play

This is inspired by the music I’m listening to right now, which is the Chance Thomas-composed score to The Lord of the Rings Online‘s latest expansion, The Riders of Rohan. The score is, frankly, gorgeous. I don’t think I really have an ear for the actual quality of music, in terms of whether the orchestra was well-conducted or the score well-arranged or whatever, but…

An MMO expansion has a score. Recorded by a real orchestra. They had enough faith in it as music for its own sake that they released it as an album on iTunes. Now, yeah, it’s really unlikely that you, the non-LOTRO player, are going to rush out and snap it up just because I say it’s really awesome, but it’s one of those things that deserves to be recognized. An MMO, that isn’t WoW, is doing well enough that they can give an expansion the movie treatment with their music. And how are they doing so well?

By giving the game away. For free. No box to buy: download all hundred and eleventy gigs of the game for free. No monthly fee (if you don’t want one): no credit card, no nothing, just login and go.

They didn’t start that way, of course. Back six years ago, WoW had set in stone (it seemed) (and no, not created) the model for massively multiplayer online gaming: buy the game, then pay a monthly fee to play it on their servers. Everyone else was doing it the same way, LOTRO included. But then a couple years ago things started to sour in the MMO market, no one seemed to be able to build a sustainable subscriber base. (And they still can’t, I think.) Even WoW’s peak numbers started to dwindle.

So LOTRO went free. Normally this was a death-knell for MMOs. But something funny had happened. The year before Turbine, LOTRO’s studio, had made one of their other games, Dungeons & Dragons Online, free-to-play and introduced a cash store. They drew a line at being able to completely outfit your character from the store, you still had to play the game to get the good gear and such, but they started selling a lot of convenience and nice-to-have items and perks for cash. And despite giving the game away, no longer requiring subscription, their revenues went UP. And by all accounts, when they did the same with LOTRO, their revenues skyrocketed. A game that had looked like it was wobbling a bit, suddenly took on new life.

And now, two years later, they’ve released two major expansions and thrown money at a Hollywood-esque score for the most recent one. Holy crap.

I’m excited, of course, because I like the game. For all its other faults, it’s “my” game, and I really want to see it continue and grown and whatnot. But it’s also exciting to see economic models for creative products grow and change and find non-traditional ways of doing things. Gives one hope that there’s a multitude of ways to make a living from creative pursuits.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.