Tag Archives: Tolkien Enterprises

Amazon Renews Plans for a Middle-earth MMO while LOTRO Abides… for Now

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News this week included the announcement that Amazon Games, which had previously scrapped a development partnership with a company later purchased by Tencent for a Lord of the Rings title, had returned to the Middle-earth well, this time with the company that purchased Tolkein Enterprises, the uncomfortably names Ebracer Group.

Here they come again

This would have been a bit of a “wake me when it actually means something” sort of story for me… after all, we have heard this tale before from Amazon… except for the fact that it showed up just as I was attempting to launch back into Lord of the Rings Online, the one title in the universe most likely to be threatened by this Amazon venture.

Of course, none of the involved parties are saying that right now.  In fact, they are saying the opposite.  The LOTRO team declared that the game isn’t going anywhere in the forums and the Amazon Games studio VP Chris Hartmann is allowing that the games can “co-exist.”

That said, he also seemed pretty sure elsewhere that LOTRO players would simply migrate to their new title.

Even the most likely scenario is… for people just to move over, because the other one is an old game.

Part of me feels the hubris that seemed to infect New World, where Amazon seemed to feel that lessons learned in the industry could be disregarded because they were smarter than that.  The saving grace for New World was that they did have something fun and a bit different, even if Amazon had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way about things like having a test server.

Among the lessons of the last 30 years or so is that people invested in one title are not likely to move on to another merely because it is new.  I think a very direct lesson in this regard was EverQuest II, which SOE seemed to assume people would migrate to from EverQuest.

And EQ players certainly tried it out, but many just went back to the old game after their initial experience, while a good many moved on to World of Warcraft.  That left EQII, the newer and, in some mechanical ways, the arguably better title forever in the shadow of its predecessor.

The combination of the world and its setting, its familiarity, the fond memories, and the sense of community conspire to hold people in place even when other newer and possibly better options appear… which is the lesson of pretty much every fantasy MMORPG launched after WoW, including LOTRO.

The general chat of every new MMORPG beta or launch since 2004 has included a litany of comparisons to WoW and how it did x, y, or z better than this new title, something supported by the gaming news, which just loves to brand things as a simple “WoW clone” so they can look insightful and move on.

That isn’t entirely without merit.  If you pull back far enough, if you aren’t interested in details, distinctions, or lore, all fantasy MMORPGs look about the same.  The same could be said for four door family sedans or mid-sized SUVs… they’re all about the same in the end if you just glance at the general spec.

For those who get deep into the games, for those for whom the details matter, for the connoisseurs of the MMORPG genre, the games are often dissimilar as to make such hand waving comparisons seem bizarre.  LOTRO is NOT like WoW, nor was Warhammer Online just like WoW, Richard Bartle comments aside.  Fans of WoW run off to try new titles and find that they still really like WoW due to the details of the game and not the general pattern of the primary game play loop of the general art style. This has been repeated enough to be a trope of the genre.

Likewise, if you are invested in the nuances of LOTRO and all that the development team has built up over the last sixteen years, then some new title that is only superficially similar… it is an MMORPG… or maybe it is… and it is set in Middle-earth… has an extremely high likelihood of not being satisfying for all of its shiny newness.

And I strongly suspect that anything Amazon produces will bear only a superficial resemblance to what LOTRO offers today.  I opined eight years ago, as we passed through a past LOTRO anniversary, half the game’s lifetime ago now, that the era of making anything as sprawling and chaotic as Turbine’s vision of Middle-earth seemed done and gone.

Who would ever fund such a thing?  Sure, LOTRO is a financial success, if a modest one.  But it never lived up to its potential or promises or reach that Turbine internally assumed it would.  So the question is who would thrown a lot of money into a similar investment?

Yahoo Headline 2007

Nobody.  I believed that eight years ago and I think that still stands.  Amazon is not going to make something that feels at all like LOTRO.  I will be genuinely surprised if they get anywhere close. (I’ll even be modestly surprised if they ship anything at all honestly, but that is another opinion piece to be written)

So good news for LOTRO then, right?  Unless Amazon and Embracer gives it the (completely predictable) SWG treatment, declaring that there can only be one Middle-earth MMORPG, things should be fine.  And, while everybody is saying LOTRO is safe, the news is still hedging a bit on the long term prospects of the title, with Game Developer throwing this line into the mix:

Standing Stone will continue to keep its Lord of the Rings MMO up and running as Amazon’s separate Lord of the Rings MMO is being developed.

Yeah, and what happens once it has been developed and is ready to launch?

That is tomorrow’s problem though.  We’ll set that aside for a few paragraphs and assume that LOTRO will carry on as before and things will be great, even when Amazon launches its new game.

Except, of course, this news comes just as I am returning to LOTRO and… oh boy… the game is a mess.  Leaving aside the playability issues at resolutions above 1920×1080 and the muddle that is (and always has been) the UI and the long encroachment of free to play into the game mechanics where nearly every alert has something you can buy with a mithril coin or five, the game needs some serious work.

And we can start with the launcher, move through into client performance… 64-bit did not give the game any help it seems… and then drive straight through into ongoing and very noticeable lag issues in game.

For the latter, I’m not just talking about Bree when there are half a dozen bands lined up on a Saturday night ready to play when you walk out of the Prancing Pony and the world takes a deep breath and says it will get back to you in a few minutes leaving you stuck in place until it can figure everything out.  I am seeing some bad moments with annoying frequency while out and pretty much alone in the Midgewater Marshes and the Lone Lands.

It is not a good look.  And I know I put the UI in the category of “leaving aside,” but I feel I need to reneg on that and say that the UI, even when scaling isn’t an issue, leaves a lot to be desired.

But, as I said, that does not impact the current, dedicate base of users.  If you’re in a band that stands outside the Prancing Pony on a Saturday night waiting for your turn to perform, some new title… which probably won’t support anything like the LOTRO music system… isn’t going to interest you.  The problems of the game are already baked into your decision as to where you want to spend your time.

However, when we get to 2028 or whenever this new Amazon Middle-earth title that will completely not like New World at all arrives on the scene (and I don’t know why they insist on saying it won’t be like New World, since a lot of that title seems pretty solid, so clearly Amazon is still smarting from something on that front if they’re disavowing it in their own special way), then the option for any NEW players who want to run around in Middle-earth will be the 20+ year old LOTRO and all of its problems, or something shiny and new where they can get in on the ground floor and it probably plays well on their 20 Core i17 CPU or PS7 or XBlizzBox BS or whatever.

And that is where LOTRO‘s slow walk into oblivion gets accelerated.

Because that cuts off most of the potential new players, and while the old players remain, they eventually tire of move on, and eventually the game will fall below the level of profitability if there isn’t some replacement for those who leave.  And the threshold for profitability is higher for LOTRO than a title like EverQuest because Tolkien Enterprises… or Middle-earth Enterprises, as Embracer has renamed it… needs to get paid for the license every month.  Probably off the top.

All of which brings me back to something I wrote in Monday’s post, that being crap at higher resolutions and generally being problematic to play is an existential threat in the long term, and that threat only gets larger if there is another Middle-earth out there.

Though, honestly, I think Embracer is going to give LOTRO the SWG treatment when the time comes.  I mean, they can do the same math I can.  And they might even convince themselves that if they shut down LOTRO and force people to move on, Amazon’s title will benefit to some degree.

And if it is that obvious, then EG7 will be do those same calculations as well, which means that investing in any major upgrades will seem futile, so there will be no wide screen support and new users will taper off and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  They will, as a business, opt for maintaining profitability for as long as they can, which will mean only working on things that will directly bring in revenue (expansions and cash shop items) while ignoring ongoing problems and trimming back staff to keep the books balanced.

The future is, as always, grim.

So who is working on a LOTRO pirate server already?  It is never too early to start on these things because if sure feels like the writing is on the wall.

Related:

And What of Middle-earth?

Here we are in 2014 and the news coming out of Turbine is… odd.

It was previously announced that there was to be no new expansion for LOTRO in 2014, a change up from their annual ritual of hawking extra pre-order goodies and special cosmetic gear for the Super Special Collector’s Edition of whatever bit of Middle-earth is being targeted.  While the effort behind an expansion no doubt eat up a lot staff hours, those are people on staff.  Turbine isn’t doing binge and purge staffing for projects that I have heard, so there are people on payroll to do the work.   So why not set them to churning out another beautiful cash cow depicting the fields of Pelennor or the Paths of the Dead or the Dead Marshes?  Drop in a few nifty cloaks, a special mount, and another experience boosting pocket item for those who buy in big, and Robert is thus reaffirmed as your mother’s brother or some such.  Basically, the same expansion plan we have every year.

Not that there are not some issues with business as usual.  There is the ever higher pile of levels and Turbine clinging onto the “you must buy every expansion” attitude that I think even EverQuest started to shed this many expansions in by offering “catch-up” bundles of all previous expansions.  Even Blizzard is doing that with their WoW Battlechest at this point (you could have had everything through Cataclysm for $5.00 over the holidays), while SOE went to a model of “the latest expansion gets you all previous expansions and the base game” back when they were a subscription only model, and moved to selling only the last two expansions and offering up everything else for free after the F2P conversion.

That whole thing is getting in the way of Turbine selling you an insta-leveled character, as they seem reluctant throw in an expansion or two with the deal, which leaves them stuck at boosting you to level 50 in a game already at level 95.  I suspect Turbine will see the light on this at some point, but it does call out how the baggage of so many expansions can restrict their options.

But there will be no expansion this year, so compounding the levels/expansions issue has been deferred.  So they must be working on something else then.  What could it be?

Pengail Attacks!

Making Pengail hate goblins eve more?

According to a recent LOTRO event, summed up at Contains Moderate Peril, no new dungeons or raids are planned.  Nor will housing see much attention nor kinships nor any such related items.  There was a mention of a potential revamp of one of the base game regions, though no region had been picked at this time.  There is still some tuning being done on the big skill and specialization revamp that came with the Helm’s Deep expansion.  But this event, taken with the producer’s letter from last month, certainly makes it feel as if Turbine doesn’t have much planned for LOTRO in 2014.

All of which makes me wonder if we are hitting a point of decision when it comes to the game.  As I noted way back in 2008, Turbine and Tolkien Enterprises signed a deal that gave Turbine rights to the property out through 2014.

And here we are in 2014.  How did that happen so fast?

So Turbine has been sitting on those rights for over seven years now.  But now we are at a renewal point.  Turbine has an option to extend to 2017, but the details around what rights Tolkien Enterprises might have at this juncture are unknown.  I suspect they have some ability to deny the extension, for a price, which would certainly leave Turbine in the lurch if that came to pass.  For money makers Turbine pretty much has LOTRO and Dungeons & Dragons Online, another licensed IP.  Meanwhile, Tolkien Enterprises, with part three of the movie series ostensibly based on the book The Hobbit coming out in December, might very well be wondering if their interests might be better served by selling whatever exclusive rights Turbine has been granted to some other studio.

Not that Tolkien Enterprises isn’t making money off of Turbine.  LOTRO has been successful enough when measured against a backdrop where EverQuest is the top dog, peaking at 550K subscriptions.  But few care about where EQ peaked in 2003 since World of Warcraft passed the 12 million subscriber mark post-Cataclysm.  Even the Turbine team is pretty blunt on that point when asked about subscriber numbers, with Sapience saying,

Unless we can say we have 10 million players and are bigger than WoW, what’s the point?

Life in the shadow.

So, do I think LOTRO is doomed to shut down this year?  It doesn’t seem highly likely.  Unless Tolkien Enterprises has another paying customer lined up and ready to go, LOTRO is still a revenue stream.  But I am going to guess that there are some negotiations going on as to the future of the license.  This in turn might mean some uncertainty for Turbine who, quite rightly, might not want to invest time and effort into a game whose future is in doubt.  Since the resources for projects are shared across teams, it might be better for them to bet on something with a more secure future.

But what will a quiet year of minor changes mean for LOTRO?  What will drive revenue if there is no expansion and few changes?

And do you think we will still be able to play the game in 2015?

Addendum: Contains Moderate Peril has a statement from Turbine about having an agreement that goes out until 2017.  “The license was renewed” was the phrase used, but some think there is some wiggle room in that, and it still doesn’t explain Turbine’s seeming mild interest in LOTRO for 2014.

What is in the Future for LOTRO?

Lord of the Rings Online is in the midst of its six year anniversary celebrations.

Six Years of Middle-earth

Six Years of Middle-earth

Six years ago Vanguard was sputtering along, with Brad McQuaid speaking up about all the problems as I was speculating on how they might get out of their mess. (And two of those came to pass.)  I was past level 50 in EverQuest II with a fae, the new race that came along with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. I was also playing with our brand new Wii.  And Potshot and I were becoming immersed in Lord of the Rings Online for the first time, an MMO that was getting some buzz.

Yahoo Headlines

Yahoo Headlines

The timing was about right for us, as the instance group was on something of a hiatus as Earl moved from one coast to another and set up shop in the big city.  The four of us who jumped in started what would become a recurring pattern of play in Middle-earth.

At some point, somebody would be unable to play for an extended time and the remaining four of us would roll up fresh characters on a new server.  Generally classes and such had changed enough that we really needed the fresh start to build up characters.  We would get up to about level 30 or so in the Lone Lands, and then taper off as the fifth person in the group joined back up, leaving us out of sync in Middle-earth.

And so our adventures would end, never having reached Rivendell as we headed back to Azeroth or Telara.

And even those occasional wanderings in LOTRO appear to be at an end for our group, as it has been vetoed for further play by one of the group members.  So far only LOTRO and EverQuest II are on the explicit veto list.

The group only ever made it into the end phase of the Lone Lands, while I only ever made it part way into Moria.  And that may be the furthest any of us ever get.

And while part of that is because of our past experience, another aspect is the future of LOTRO itself.

A little over five years ago there was the announcement that Turbine and Tolkien Enterprises had signed an agreement to extend the licensing for the game out to 2014.  That seemed way out in the future… but now it is next year.  And what will happen then?  There was an option on the agreement to extend the deal to 2017, but I imagine that both parties have veto power on that.  Things have changed since 2008.

Since that agreement was signed, Turbine was been acquired and folded into Warner Brothers Home Entertainment.

And I am not sure how that will affect things.

On the one hand, Warner has other license agreements with Tolkien Enterprises which have lead to some lucrative and fun games, such as LEGO Lord of the Rings.

On the other hand, the Tolkien estate has also felt the need to sue Warner for misuse of the Tolkien IP.  And since Warner are no doubt be the ones doing the negotiating for LOTRO now, you have to wonder if that bad blood will color things.

It seems likely that the game is good until 2017, but all of that still makes you wonder.  Especially when Turbine suddenly decided to pull Asheron’s Call 2 out of cold storage late last year.  Is that a sign that they are worried, that they have nothing else viable in the works, or that they just have plenty of free time on their hands?

How much longer do you think we have for LOTRO?

It is like Star Wars Galaxies or The Matrix Online in that, as a licensed IP, when it ceases to be profitable… or of interest to the licensing entity… it will go away, never to be seen again.

LOTRO Good Until 2014… or 2017!

One news tidbit that came up last week was that Turbine has reached an agreement with Tolkien Enterprises to extend the licensing agreement for Lord of the Rings Online out until 2014, with an option to further extend the agreement out to 2017.

I was a bit surprised to find that Turbine was only good with the LotR IP for 3 to 4 years after launch. On the other hand, this might have been Tolkien Enterprises protecting itself in case things went poorly. Turbine, though, has done an admirable job of bringing Middle-earth to life and making a popular MMO.

This still brings me back to the question of how long an MMO is expected to last on the market.

Ultima Online will pass the 11 year mark this September. EverQuest will hit 9 years of age in a couple of weeks. Both games remain extremely popular, at least when viewed through their (pessimistic in hindsight) pre-release subscription targets.

Games that last that long, that have that much staying power, are rare indeed. But games that do hang on for a decade or more tend to have one thing in common: A loyal community.

Community keeps games like EverQuest alive. Heck, community has kept the MUD I started playing nearly 15 years ago alive.

On the last SOE podcast they effectively (if not literally) said that a game like EverQuest will remain available as long as there are enough people left playing to justify keeping a server going.

EverQuest has enough of a community still, nearly nine years later, to justified continued expansions of the game. This is why I keep getting on the accessibility kick for EverQuest. With revenue enough to justify expansions, now is the time to lay the groundwork to allow new people to pick up the game. More important than graphic updates for old world zones are things like a WASD keyboard layout and intuitive camera controls, at least to my mind.

On its current trajectory, EverQuest will be around for quite a few more years.

SOE has an advantage in that it owns the intellectual property that makes up the world of Norrath. They can trim back EverQuest to match revenues until there is a single server and a skeleton crew to keep it functioning.

But what happens when somebody else owns the intellectual property that makes up the world around which an MMO is built?

The licensing party, the owner of the intellectual property, has a different set of priorities. They not only have their own revenue targets, and in many cases, a competing set of choices by which to reach them, but they also have the responsibility to keep the property active, alive, and seen in a positive light.

Those goals may not line up with running an MMO down to the last server. Being associated with a dying, out of date game is probably not any an IP managers list of goals. And then there is the constant siren song any popular IP has of new project offers.

So there is a refinement to the oft asked question, “How long will a popular MMO stay up?”

What is the threshold for bringing down an MMO based on a popular IP? How much of a community is required to keep a game like Lord of the Rings Online (or Star Wars Galaxies) viable? Is a company better off rolling their own IP rather than going with an already established one?

This is probably why Brenlo gets asked about Star Wars Galaxies shutting down as often as he does.