The Lord of the Rings Online Open Beta Overview

The folks at Gamers With Jobs have written an overview of what Turbine has planned for the open beta period of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

In order to entice players to get in and *really* beta the game, they dangled three carrots. The first and most obvious is that the loyal core gets to keey their characters — they get to forevermore be ahead of our friends. While a pure win for the hard-core, I’m sure there’s someone in a conference room arguing that they may alienate the casual player who buys the game off the shelf at Best Buy, only to discover a larger part of the community way ahead.

The second, riskier carrot, is the price break. By getting in early, new players get the opportunity to play for $10 a month, forever. On the surface, this seems like pure lost revenue — a 33% discount that Turbine will be saddled with forever. But, the trick is you have to keep playing. For the serial Warcraft player, this price structure will work. Many people (myself included) reactivate their WoW account for a few months every year, effectively giving Blizzard the equivalent of one-retail-game’s revenue. There’s no disincentive. Characters live on forever there in digital limbo, waiting for you to press enter on the billing screen. In the case of LOTRO, once you step off the train, your price goes up. There’s no coming back for the discount later. You can play the dip-your-toes in once a year game, just like you did with Blizzard, but if you even think you’ll play the game long term, the loss of that $5 a month discount will give you pause.

The last carrot is also financial: a “lifetime” subscription for $200. This is much harder to justify in the long term. It ensures that Turbine will have a very good month, and little else. Pollyanna would say that they’re simply rewarding the core audience — those lore-focussed players who will hang around the Tolkein bar until the last stool is upended and the lights go out. But the cynic in me counters with the notion that an actuary in coffee-stained cubicle at Turbine’s office has determined that the average player who pre-orders will only stay for 18 months, and thus the $200 is a chance to get an extra twenty bucks, and even better, get it now. The deeply antisocial part of me worries that said actuary thinks the game will LAST for 18 months.