D&D Online revenues up 500 per cent

By Robert Purchese Published 1 March, 2010

Free-to-play response "phenomenal".

Turbine's free-to-play relaunch of Dungeons & Dragons Online - Eberron Unlimited - has attracted one million players and boosted revenues by a whopping 500 per cent.

Traditional subscriber numbers have also doubled since the September 2009 launch, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

"The response from players to DDO Unlimited has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Turbine president Jim Crowley.

"We've known all along how great this game is and by implementing an innovative new model that put the players in charge of how they pay and play DDO Unlimited, we've successfully expanded our reach and injected new energy into the game."

The sale of content through microtransactions in Turbine's digital store are three times the industry average, according to Turbine.

"The launch of DDO Unlimited has been a huge success and has really taken the game to a new level," added Fernando Paiz, executive producer.

"As we celebrate our fourth birthday, the game has never been better and we're just getting started with more adventure packs, more store items, and other innovative features coming in the major updates we have planned throughout 2010."

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Turambar #1 2 years ago

    More MMO's should adopt this model. It'd probably do well for Star Trek Online.

  • TheJuriel #2 2 years ago

    It's nice to hear it's working out well for them! This is the kind of approach I wish more (non-korean) MMOs dared to take.

  • Earlyflash #3 2 years ago

    Is it free to play in Europe yet?

  • CaoSlayer #4 2 years ago

    No, as far as Im aware.

    Still, I play it without any trouble, there is not ip region ban.

  • Shrike #5 2 years ago

    Good for them. Glad it's working.

  • Bodd #6 2 years ago

    I'm not normally a fan of F2P MMOs, but I've recently returned to DDO and am having enough of a blast that I subscribed to VIP status in the first week. This unlocks the majority of the game content, while still leaving the option of paying for fluff/convenience items. There are thankfully no game-breaking uber items in the shop, nor anything that you have to buy to realistically play the game. Turbine have pitched their microtransactions perfectly: on the back of the debacles from Champions and Allods, this is a breath of fresh air in the MMO market.

  • SleepyMagpie #7 2 years ago

    How far have you leveled your character(s), Bodd?

    I believed the game to be playable without purchases as well, but having reached level 9 the picture changes a bit, at least when playing with a less than full party. I've played in parties of 3, all very experienced players, me handling the Clerical duties, and still, at level 8 or thereabouts we found ourselves paying for henchmen, paying for potions, etc..

    So, if played in full parties of 6 I guess you can get by without buying anything, but trying to play with a sub-optimal set-up does look like it warrants regular expenditures. And I'm not sure that it's always easy getting a full, workable group.

    In closing, I was very positive towards D&D O, the game mechanics otherwise are great, but it's been engineered very shrewdly to slowly suck your RL coinage. Mostly without you noticing it. -Except for the spam in your mailbox that is! ^^

  • DFawkes #8 2 years ago

    I tried this out at the weekend for the first time, it's actually quite good. I'm not sure if it's officially suppurted in Europe, but you can definitely dign up and playm and I'd recommend giving it a go if you fancy it.

    I'm not surprised it's making lots of money either, I could understand it being easy to just buy an extra race, then another class, and keep just taking the extra little bits. It's not like you can't get plenty out of it without the purchasable stuff either - it's pretty generous as is at the start - though I suspect SleepyMagpie is spot on about it later on.

  • Bodd #9 2 years ago

    SleepyMagpie: I'm mostly duoing the game with myself as a Drow (unlocked in game, not paid for) Rogue/Ranger and the missus playing a pure cleric with greataxe spec. We're well into level 9 without buying any items other than collectable bags; we've just finished the Threnal eastern excavation quests (level 10, balanced party recommended). You're quite right that there's a noticeable ramping of difficulty in this range, but we've not felt the need to spend real cash to get powered up just yet. I'm sure Turbine would like us to though, and clearly plenty of people do.

  • Sunyavadin #10 2 years ago

    It worked really well when Anarchy Online implemented it five years ago.I think it's now the only thing Funcom have that turns a small profit...

  • sneetch #11 2 years ago

    Fair play to them! Glad to see them doing well.

  • SleepyMagpie #12 2 years ago

    Well, more power to you and the missus, Bodd, hope it continues to work out.

    Look out for the undead missions though, bring THE RIGHT GEAR or you could start hurting! ^^

  • Sunyavadin #13 2 years ago

    revenues blabla means very little if you have extra server costs for 1 mln players. How are the profit margins? Americans with their lieing statistics.

    Generally it's quite provable that the more people have free access to something, the more buy it, that's a very simple bit of statistical correlation. It's true of games, of books, of music, of film...

    I've run gaming servers from my living room before, and even with mine, which starts to lag once more than about 16 players are online simultaneously, if TWO of the regular players there were to pay a subscription fee, that'd cover the electricity and bandwidth costs of running it, as well as upgrades now and again to capacity...
    Now, as you get to larger and larger systems, at wholesale costs, it becomes cheaper proportionally to run them. So you need less of your customers to pay to reap a profit. Net result, more money in the bank.

  • FooAtari #14 2 years ago

    What servers are you guys on? Installed this the other day, but yet to give it a go. But not the first time I have read that soloing on the game is damn near impossible and you pretty have to be in a group to get anywhere. Now it seems the group has to be pretty large too!

  • wittynic #15 2 years ago

    Now please relaunch AC2 with this model :( i know only like 200 people would play it, but im one of them dammit!