Dungeons & Dragons Online: Switching Gears

Gamasutra has published a four-page editorial about Turbine’s recent decision to switch Dungeons & Dragons Online over to a free-to-play business model. Along with commentary from executive producer Fernando Paiz and director of communications Adam Mersky, the article also features some input from Atlus Online’s Jamie Ortiz (who’s dealt with a similar transition with Neo Steam: The Shattered Continent).

Ortiz doesn’t underestimate the kind of difficulties Turbine faces in switching business models with Dungeons & Dragons Online. When discussing his company’s experience with Neo Steam, he said, “It’s not enough to just put out a free game. This is a completely different business model that requires a different back-end infrastructure and different organizational model than a subscription business.”

Ortiz offered examples pulled from the company’s Neo Steam experience. “A lot of customer service in a subscription game is in-game support. ‘My character is stuck in a tree,’ ‘I lost my special sword,’ that sort of thing. Support for billing and commerce is much simpler.”

“Free-to-play games, on the other hand, need a lot more exterior support,” said Ortiz. “You have multiple ways to pay, a number of different monetization methods, various levels of service. You need a larger investment in fraud prevention along with policies on dealing with ‘soft fraud’, like a kid using his parent’s credit card and a customer service staff trained to deal with it. You need people who know how to run an e-commerce business, not just a game.”

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Unsurprisingly, the folks at Turbine don’t think they have a problem when it comes to quality content. “(Dungeons & Dragons Online) was a game with three and a half years of content development,” Paiz said. “We’ve had a lot of time to address issues like the lack of solo play that were in the game at launch. This allows us to do what we do best: offer people great handcrafted content experiences.”

Having all that content presented its own challenges for the development team, though. The company contracted with Playspan, a Silicon Valley firm that specializes in monetization solutions for MMOs and virtual spaces to build their in-game store.

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“When we sat down to look at our game, what came out is what we’re calling the ‘Three C’s — content, cosmetics and convenience,” Paiz said. Of the three, it was apparently the content portion of the game that was easiest to segregate. According to Paiz, in this they were helped by the very structure of the game itself.

“We were very true to the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons when we first designed this game. It was built around small-group dungeon experience subdivided into instanced ‘modules.’ It was comparatively simple to utilize the existing in-game NPCs, teleport portals and instance gates to just wall off the content and allow players to buy whatever adventures they want to play.”