LotR Online Goes Free To Play Next Month
MMO’s such as World of Warcraft can be great fun, especially if you have a group to play with. However, many people (especially broke college students) really don’t want to shell out $15 a month for a game that they’ve already paid full retail price for. After all, $15 can buy a lot of ramen. Well if you’ve got a group of friends that wants to level and raid together, but doesn’t want to spend the cash, you’ll have another free-to-play option once September 10th rolls around.
Lord of the Rings Online will be re-launching next month with a new free-to-play option. While it’s true that some features will be limited if you choose not to pay, it doesn’t look like it should detract from the experience very much. If you do find that you’re missing out on something (such as wanting more inventory bags, or the ability to carry more gold) you can purchase these at-will.
I won’t be foolish enough to make a bold statement about this increasingly popular business model being a “WoW killer”. However, it is slowly re-shaping the way people look at MMOs. If more companies start to move in this direction (I’m looking at you Bioware) I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blizzard consider doing something similar with WoW. Though realistically it wouldn’t likely be until they’re getting ready to release a new MMO of their own.
