The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

NowGamer chatted up Codemasters VP and general manager David Solari over the weekend about The Lord of the Rings Online’s recent shift to a free-to-play business model, among other things. A snip:

Would you agree that this route – launching as a subscription service, then going free-to-play – is becoming something of a standard MMO strategy in its own right?

It’s interesting, that kind of lifecycle management’s almost evolved typical retail products start at £40, £50, then you move down the price points until you get all the way down to a tenner, then you start to do compilations and all the rest of it.

I agree, persistent services work in absolutely the same way, and we took a conscious decision to do that when we did RF Online and Archlord we very much looked at it from a lifecycle management approach. Whether that can keep working… it had a lot of novelty when it first started happening, but I’m not sure that will continue to be the case.

I think you’re going to get more people going direct to free-to-play when they launch their game. That’s not to say that further business models won’t evolve what they might be I couldn’t say. I’m not sure it’s as easy to bring out a subscription game in a box and then convert it to item sales, because I think a lot of games will just launch directly to item sales.

It appears to be an effective, appealing business model. Whether that’ll be the case for all games, I couldn’t say, but I do believe that certain games probably suit the subscription model better than the item sales model. But you need to have the right product with the right business model that’s key.