LOTRO business model change – what about other publishers? and Europe?
So it has been announced that Lord of the Rings Online is going “free to play”. Good for them, if it works out. It does not make me want to play it, so I am more interested in the impact it may have on other publishers and developers.
How does this affect CodeMasters? They have been the European operator for both DDO and LOTRO as pay-to-play games. After DDO changed its business model I did at one time try to get the new DDO through the European DDO site. But looking at that site there was no “free to play”, just the normal subscription thing as far as I could see.
So of course I jumped over to Turbine’s own site instead. In LOTROs case though they seem to be part of the picture in some way, will they get a percentage of items sold in the store?
If this attempt is successful as well I do hope that other subscription-based games will look more into this approach, games that might struggle a bit with keeping many regular subscribers, but which could potentially do well with a lower barrier of entry (waves to Cryptic, Paragon Studios and SOE).
A ding world 
For me it will come down to whether I end up having to spend points above and beyond what my account gets for free (as a lifer) as to whether this ultimately turns out to be a good deal for me. I have gotten so burned out on LoTRO recently that I don’t have much to lose from a shakeup. It might even revive interest in some of my alts.
Word on the street is that Europe will also switch to FtP at the same time. However, my source did not mention the problems you refer too.
I would assume that there is a fair amount of players on the European side so that they would have to include that also.
Since CodeMasters supposedly will still be running LOTRO, will Turbine reduce their income from the points and/or will points simply cost more on the Euro side?