Great interview at gamernode. Some of the highlights are housing and a new region coming in October, some info on summer updates and mention of a new lifetime membership offer down the road.

What I really like is the attitude about updates. I don't much care for DDO, but I do know they get some pretty healthy updates about every 2 months.... and I like his attitude that perpetual updates are the reason we pay monthly fees.

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Brendon: I know having spoken to a few other publishers and developers there are a few companies who have their MMOs future planned out where they know, "At this point we're going to release an expansion, by this point we'll be working on the sequel, etc." so I was curious, do you guys have something internally where you have a rough guideline with where you want the game to end up or maybe peak, or are you just going along with it and seeing how long you can keep it going?

Jeff: Which one, for Lord of the Rings?

Yeah.

Okay, I'm not going to be judgmental about other people's plans, but I don't think you ever launch a game and begin talking about when it's going to go away. Let me use that as a segue for my next personal issue.

(Laughs) Go right ahead.

(Laughs) Sorry. I also get asked the other question which is "Tell us what the end-game of Lord of the Rings Online is." And I do, right? I tell them you want raids, we got raids. You want pvp, we got pvp. You want collectible armor sets for high end content great, we got that too. You want housing, we're putting that in.

So we got...you want endgame, we got endgame. But my problem with the question, is that why the heck are you asking me about the endgame for an online product? I've been working on Asheron's Call for nearly a decade now, and we've put out 80 updates for the product. It's a constant opportunity to provide episodic content for our players. I don't subscribe to the approach which is, "Hey you know what, we'll put out a game, two years later we'll throw out an expansion pack, and by the way we've just announced we're going to do a new RTS game or whatever it is that we're going to do, so all we'll do in the meantime is pocket your money." We believe that it's almost an obligation of its own to be putting constant content out for the product.

These players are looking for updates to the game because that's what they're subscribing for. Why do you want to go through the same quests for the same race for four or five years? Our approach is -- you know what, I don't understand what the other company's model is where they feel like they can just pocket people's money and be okay with that and not give a lot back to the community, but we're about giving back to the players. They're the people who are looking for and paying for new stuff. The notion of -- and this is just a personal pet peeve -- of going "You know Blizzard's endgame..." Well, what are you talking about? Why is there an end game for an online product? I wish someone could explain that one to me.

I'd love to go on a panel with one of them or something and have that explained, you know what exactly their plan means.

For us, we're totally focused. D&D [Online] today -- whether it's your thing or not your thing Brendon (laughs)--is 60% larger than when we launched it a year ago. Asheron's Call is hugely larger than when we launched it. And you look at what we're doing right now, just the update we're putting out for Evendim is six million square meters of space, or about 1/10 the size of the existing product. Between the Summer Solstice we're putting out, the huge monster play update we're putting out at the end of the summer, the housing and new region we're putting out in October -- it's just, you know, huge. I think...I think that's how it should be in this business. I don't understand why people feel like it's okay to sit back and play other products, you know, and not get updates. Regular significant updates from the publishers.

I think that was the way it used to be, and if other publishers want to just sit back and collect the annuity -- and that's how they refer to their players, as annuities. We don't get annuities, we get players, right?

Well, anyway, that's my pet peeve (laughs).


full interview