Turbine, Inc. - Goes Strictly Mobile

[Aubrielle]

Sad news for us PC gamers. Warner Bros. has decided to turn Turbine, the studio famous for Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online, into something that only makes mobile games.

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Turbine has accomplished a great deal since the company's founding in 1994 (then CyberSpace) - they not only brought us two Asheron's Call titles, Dungeons & Dragons Online, The Lords of the Rings Online, the MOBA Infinite Crisis, and a handful of expansion packs, but they also proved that a transition to a free-to-play business model could be very lucrative and substantially change the company's outlook.

However, since their acquisition by Warner Bros. in 2010, they've been hit by multiple rounds of layoffs, with the latest one apparently happening today. And that's not even the worst of the news - according to an official statement from Warner Bros., they intend to turn the studio into a mobile game developer, which would be in stark contrast to what their core audience has come to know from them:

Turbine is transitioning into a free-to-play, mobile development studio, and as a result we are eliminating some positions. The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online games will continue to operate as they do now. Re-focusing and reducing the studio size was a difficult decision for the company, and we are grateful to all of the Turbine staff for their considerable contributions.A strange move, if I've ever seen one. Furthermore, if this thread is to be believed, "the programming staff has been cut down to three people on LoTRO and three people on DDO", which doesn't bode well for those of us who are fans of either (or both) games.

More information.

 

[KaosWarMonk]

Woo-hoo (/sarcasm).

I was just thinking over the weekend as ran around the albeit visually pleasing but otherwise pretty shallow TESO how many more choices you have character-wise in older titles like… DDO.

This makes me sad and po'd. And so it goes.

edit - might have to re-sub and play for a bit before the inevitable.

 

[Carnifex]

Hey, one company to forever cross off my purchase list. My wallet thanks you!

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

*in his best movie-Gandalf voice*

You shall not...make good games!

 

[pibbur who]

Bad news. I had hoped to get to Mordor in 2017.

Pibbur

 

[joxer]

Turbine till now was into MMOs. Now they're moving to mobile.

MMO = high risk, but also high profit (WoW, LoL, MapleStory)
Mobile = low risk, high profit (FlappyBird, CandyCrush, DragonCollection)

Singleplayer games = risk is not important, you can't earn billions like with MMO/mobile if you nail a hit

Turbine joins companies who don't love their products, all they want is to sell garbage to as many people as possible.
It's nothing new, Konami did similar thing recently, only they didn't move completely to mobile/pachinko but will continue to make highly profitable football simulator while all other AAA projects are frozen indefinetly.

Sorry people but I don't see this as bad news. We don't need Turbine nor anyone like them in actual games business. They don't want to make games, they want to buy a new car every couple of months and the only way to do that without illegal practices is trying to make MMO/phonegame "bestseller".
Good luck to them. And good riddance.

 

[azarhal]

Woo-hoo (/sarcasm).

I was just thinking over the weekend as ran around the albeit visually pleasing but otherwise pretty shallow TESO how many more choices you have character-wise in older titles like… DDO.

There are no MMOs that come close to DDO character customization level out there (thanks to D&D 3.x Edition). That's not really a fair comparison.

Turbine joins companies who don't love their products, all they want is to sell garbage to as many people as possible.

Turbine is forced to joins companies who don't love their products. They are at the mercy of WB who bought them a few years ago.

 

[Drithius]

Turbine has sucked ever since they got bought up by Warner Brothers. So, while this is disappointing to see insomuch that it follows the trend of worsening mass market gaming trends, it doesn't mean that much for the already short halflife of these long-since stale titles. The studio has been merely a footnote for the Suits for a while now.

 

[TheSHEEEP]

Wow.
This is way worse than being shut down. At least that way, the name could have gone down in history meaning something, with some nice achievements.
But this…

Well, I hope the people that got laid off are moving towards greener pastures now.

 

[screeg]

Mobile = low risk, high profit (FlappyBird, CandyCrush, DragonCollection)

You mention 3 high profit sellers out of 500,000 mobile games. They're low risk, that much is accurate, but a very very small minority turn a high profit.

 

[joxer]

Yea but every single developer who goes mobile wants prays to be the fourth.

 

[rjshae]

That just leaves more market space for the little guys. At least until those assimilated and destroyed.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

When I was new at studying Geology, a professer told us that he saw this thing to be applied to business / economy as well :

If you place several crystal "seeds" into a solution, the bigger ones will become bigger, and the smaller ones wil become smaller, and he believed that the bigger ones are dissolving the small ones.

Since I'm reading about gaming news, I believe this principle to apply into business / economy, too. The "Matthew Effect" is almost like a natural law to me. But that doesn't mean it's good or healthy, imho.

 

[Zloth]

I don't get it. Turbine is hardly a household name. If they are going to completely re-focus then why doesn't WB simply shutter Turbine and make a new company with a new name?

 

[Roland]

Well there was this posted...

We'd like to clear up the forum claims of "maintenance mode": We are still in active development of LOTRO. As stated last week, our development plans remain unchanged, and LOTRO will continue to operate.