Friday, October 26, 2012

Lotro/Turbine in trouble?

Turbine just had layoffs announced and confirmed by Warner bros. You can search on the web and see it but I just wanted to speculate a little. Turbine had 400 employees. They haven't had a new game come out in a  while. They must have been pinning some revenue hopes on the Rohan expansion which got good reviews on Gamespy and such but Only people who have already spent a LOT of time recently n the game are even at the level to buy that AND I don't have most characters near big enough, my biggest is lvl 71. My brother quit playing Lotro because of the expansion. He said that it was stupid to release a level cap raiser this early since people were still grinding up levels to get to the last cap and hadn't really run the dungeons to their fullest yet. I think Turbine might be desperate for cash. Which is sad since they could have created a new MMO by now with their resources, or greatly expanded the low and mid game of Lotro which would have helped them retain people better. They aren't getting money from many of the people like me who have been around a while also because of the lifetime account deal and the free points we get, which I guess makes the business unfeasible unless we evangelize enough others who are actually paying monthly or for content additions to play. DnD Online was a mini turnaround success that I wasn't terribly interested in playing. I wonder if they will come out with a new game before they belly up as a studio.... I knew they were in trouble once Warner bought them though. Warner and other big companies have no soul, and no compunctions about firing and hiring massive swaths of people at a drop of a margin.

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