Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: As a subscriber, I recently received my VIP newsletter discussing all the new features. Are current subscribers going to any sort of additional goodies to kind of ease them into this transition? Or will they just receive the same VIP benefits as the average Joe?

Fernando: Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to be giving our subscribers some sort of additional liquidity. I don’t know if we want to divulge all the details, but we’ll certainly be doing everything that we can to make our players feel very welcome and to encourage them to try out the store. We don’t want them necessarily reaching for their wallets in the first little bit, so along with the VIP benefits, we’re going to be doing some additional introductory things as the service rolls out.

Adam: And if you haven’t seen them already, make sure you check out all the VIP benefits here. (http://www.ddo.com/vip)

Ten Ton Hammer: We’ve talked a lot about what the VIP folks are getting, but what does a free player have access to?

Kate: Free players are going to be able to access the bulk of the content in Stormreach and nearby environments. The far flung environments are going to be available in our content packs, which are going to be in the store, but many of the “common” zones players experience in the early levels of the game will just be there available for them to access.

We have a new leveling mechanic where you need to find the leveling sigil, which you can quest for, but if you’re impatient and don’t want to quest for it, you can buy them in the store. We want to make sure that free players have the option to either spend a little more time leveling up, or can just use the convenience that the store offers.

But there’s just a tremendous amount of content already there, for free, that players can come in, enjoy, and have a good time with.

Additionally, anyone that owns one of the adventure packs can purchase a guest pass, and they can invite players it that may not have purchased the content. Those players that use the guest pass should be able to have fun in that area for an entire night, and I think that’s going to be a great way for subscribers or ala carte purchasers to pull in people that are a little more casual.

Ten Ton Hammer: Looking forward, what kind of change will this new system have on the content updates that you have in DDO? I imagine we’ll still see some free additions, but are we going to begin to see more additions to the game that are VIP only or purchase only or something along those lines?

Fernando: I think you’ll see use experiment a little bit with the model and how best to optimize it for our players. But as far as things in our immediate plans, I think you’ll see us continuing to release a lot of content and if you’re a VIP you’ll have access to it first. It won’t necessarily go on sale the very first day the content is live, so players won’t be able to buy it from the store the first day. Eventually, everyone will be able to buy it from there even if they’re not a VIP.

As far as features go, we don’t have anything in mind that’s going to be VIP only, but we certainly reserve the right to add thing to the VIP offering as well as add things that are going to be free for all players. We’ll do whatever is appropriate for what the service needs at the time.

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that DDO has hit the level cap, the next things that you’re going to be working on in the D&D core rules are things like the rest of the races, classes, and the epic levels. Could we see those come in as items that you’d need to purchase from the store?

Fernando: Yeah, I think you’ll definitely be seeing some things like that, and there will be some available even at the beginning of the service. You’ll certainly see some new things going in there, and maybe some content that VIP players will have to pay for – even though that hasn’t been finalized. There’s also content that can be unlockable through the game, but if you don’t want to spend the time to unlock those characters, you can purchase them from the store.

Ten Ton Hammer: Obviously you’re switching to a F2P game because you believe that you can make more money in this sort of business model than you could with a straight subscription plan. Why did you think that was the case?

Fernando: Absolutely this is a learning experience for Turbine for the future. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything for LOTRO or Asheron’s Call. But as a company, absolutely we’re learning from what we do in this project and how to apply it in the future.

In terms of DDO in particular, we did start by taking a look at DDO and LOTRO and what we might be able to do with this type of model. The reason DDO rose to be the top candidate was because it is already our non-traditional MMO. It isn’t the traditional open world, work your way up through level cap in the EQ, AC, WoW style. It’s already a little bit different, and it’s a different type of game. It’s not full of those open world shared spaces, it’s highly instanced, and a variety of different sorts of play styles are involved in the game.

Even at launch, we heard rumblings that this wasn’t exactly what people were expecting out of a subscription model game, and the subscription was a barrier of entry for the number of people that we’d like to see play in the game, even though the game’s been doing well for three years.

We saw the potential to use this big brand of D&D Online and relaunch it to a wider audience. We then wouldn’t be tied down by a subscription.

Ten Ton Hammer: Were you just waiting for the free to play model to mature before releasing DDO in this sort of scheme?

Adam: It’s really a combination of things. The West had to learn this buyer behavior thing. Would you have ever purchased just one song five years ago? You had to watch the Sopranos when the Sopranos was actually on five years ago. Now you can watch it whenever the hell you want.

I think that this is coming isn’t purely because we want to make more money. We have a much broader audience today than we did three years ago when DDO launched. If we go back ten years ago, MMOs were an elite club for the super hardcore. We have people in LOTRO that had never touched an MMO in their lives.

We’re seeing a big diversification. WoW is sponsoring the halftime show in the NBA playoffs. The games are becoming more mainstream.  At the end of the day, this isn’t about business models, this is about player choice. The debate in the free-to-play versus the subscription has always been just that, the black and white choice. Now Turbine is coming out with a model that gives you a broader proposition. You need to give players a choice on how they’re going to play their games, and then you’ll attract a different audience.

By bringing this model to bear, we’ve effectively eliminated the number one barrier to MMOs: the subscription.  On the other hand, the main reason why people play MMOs is because their friends do. And what’s exciting about this is that if Fernando and Kate are VIPs and I go in to try it out, you can purchase a guest pass to invite me in to a specific adventure that I don’t have access to. Then I have that option to check out the content and really see if this is up my alley or not before I go out and buy it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for your time, and good luck with the new version of DDO!