asherons-call-2 posts

Last night's surprise (and extremely late) news story on MMO game developer Turbine being acquired by Warner Bros. has now yielded some more info, according to the Boston.com web site (Turbine is based in Boston). According to their unnamed sources Warner Bros. paid $160 million to purchase Turbine. That amount includes "sums to be paid to Turbine shareholders in future years if the company meets certain financial targets."

While Turbine has never officially announced how many players they have for their subscription-based MMO games Asheron's Call and Lord of the Rings Online, the story says that Turbine admitted to having over one million players for Dungeons and Dragons Online, which moved to a free-to-play business model last year. Also Martin Tremblay, the current president of Warner Bros. Interactive, stated in the story they plan to work with the Turbine team to develop more games. Warner Bros. is home to The Matrix movies; the MMO based on the films, The Matrix Online, shut down in 2009. Warner Bros is also home to DC Comics. The super hero MMO DC Universe Online, is currently in development at Sony Online.

Ten years ago today, back when there wasn't a new MMO launching or being announced every week, developer Turbine released Asheron's Call. Their fantasy-themed MMO quickly joined Ultima Online and the original Everquest in terms of popularity. For a couple of years the genre was dominated by these "Big Three" games.

While a sequel, Asheron's Call 2, failed to attract an audience (it launched in 2002 and was shut down just over three years later) the original is still online. Today Turbine announced that the game is celebrating the 10th anniversary with live events today. Part of those events will bring back some of the game's old characters and villains. Turbine continues to expand the game with new content and will soon add a new skill, Gearcrafting, to the game.

Boston-based game developer Turbine has had a busy 2008. It brought in a new management team, it announced a new round of venture capital funding and this fall it will launch Mines of Moria, their first commercial expansion pack to their fantasy MMO Lord of the Rings Online. Last week Turbine announced plans to expand to the west coast with an office in Redwood City, California.

So what does all this mean for the MMO developer? Big Download got a quick update on the company's plans as their director of communications Adam Mersky answered our questions.

Boston-based MMO developer Turbine has its sights set on the west coast once again. The company, who recently secured a $40 million investement deal, has just announced the formation of a new game development studio in Redwood City, California. Two of the new studio heads are former Flagship Studios members; it's co-founder Dave Brevik is now the Creative Director at the new Turbine studio while engineering director Jeff Lind led the Ping0 team that created the online service for Flagship.

As we mentioned, this isn't the first time that Turbine has tried to launch a west coast dev studio. The company opened up an office in Santa Monica, California in early 2004 but shut down the operations less than two years later (along with their MMO Asheron's Call 2). There's no specifics on what the new Turbine west coast office will be working on.

[via email press release]

There are a large number of MMO games that have stayed online even after they lose most of their audience. However there are also a number of games that completely shut down their operations; The Sims Online, Earth and Beyond, Motor City Online . . . and those are just the ones from Electronic Arts. 1Up.com has an interesting feature story on how the developers and the community of shut down MMO games deal with the aftermath.

The article focuses on three now shut down titles; one is the Cyan Worlds developed game Myst Online: Uru Live which has actually died twice; once as part of an online beta for the single player game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and later as its own product via the game download service Gametap. Despite a number of loyal players, Gametap decided to shut down Myst Online just last April and the article quotes Cyan founder Rand Miller as saying, " I don't want to be part of the game that wouldn't die. But at the same time, we've grown to love this thing."

Another game featured in the article is the Netdevil developed car combat game Auto Assault. Its publisher NCsoft shut down the servers in August 2007, just over a year after it launched, but a group of ex-Auto Assault players are trying to develop their own similar effort called Apokalypsos. Turbine's fantasy MMO Asheron's Call 2 still has its fans two years after its shutdown; according to a Turbine team member they get petitions from ex-players trying to revive the game. It appears that a select few don't want to let go of their passions and move on. The question is; is that healthy or not?