The state of LotRO

That pipeweed must be powerful stuff, because other than what he was smoking I can't find a good explanation for Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel claiming that Lord of the Rings Online will be the next big thing in mass-market MMO successes. Thanks, Jaxom, for alerting me to that article.

I agree with him that there are several steps of success for a MMO, step 1 being to make a viable game, and step 2 being getting enough subscribers to be profitable. And I'm sure LotRO got to that step. But step 3, market dominance, seems to be totally out of reach for LotRO. Even with the Mines of Moria expansion and The Hobbit movie.

Of course it is hard to say how successful exactly LotRO really is, Turbine doesn't release any sales or subscription numbers. Even if we had subscription numbers, they wouldn't tell us much, because they include lifetime subscriptions. Hey, I'm a LotRO subscriber, I just haven't played the game for like forever. I don't regret that lifetime subscription, because it gives me more options what to play at any given moment. But I can't say that LotRO grabbed me like WoW or WAR did.

I should check out the current state of LotRO. When I played it, it was great until the mid-20's, and then got a bit boring. Not quite as extreme a drop as Age of Conan, which after level 20 just becomes a completely different game, but still a noticeable drop in quality. But with lots of content patches that should have become better by now. Only I don't have the time to play LotRO. The second half of 2008 is stuffed with new game releases, and many of them interest me far more than LotRO or the Mines of Moria. And as I don't have subscription numbers and can only "measure" the MMO blog buzz about LotRO, I must say that I think I'm not the only one with that attitude. The Mines of Moria will just get buried under WAR and WotLK.

Steefel says that better marketing or bringing out a console version could catapult LotRO to the top. Well, he sure could use some better marketing, but I don't think he'll even reach Warhammer's numbers just with that. As for a console version, there are too many people talking about bringing MMOs to the console, and too few successes. Final Fantasy XI is on the console, and it's still just one of many "stage 2" (profitable but not dominating) games out there. It isn't even totally clear whether the MMO gameplay and business model would be such a big hit on consoles. Most MMORPGs are far too complicated to be easily controlled with a gamepad. I can imagine a console version of Wizard101, but not of WoW, WAR, or LotRO.

LotRO is a nice enough game, and well worth checking out if you have nothing else to do. But you need to smoke a lot of pipeweed before you think it could one day become a "WoW killer". It's more likely to remain forever an "also ran". Which, as long as it is profitable, isn't actually all that bad.