14 DAY TRIAL // Turbine, makers of Lord of the Rings Online, have just extended the rights agreement they had with Tolkien Enterprises, regarding the intellectual properties Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. The deal ends in 2014, with an extra option tagged on to further extend it until 2017. Tolkien Enterprises, the society that administers all the intellectual property associated with J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, is notoriously fickle about who gets what access to their IP, so this is real good news for Turbine.
Jim Crowley, who is both president and CEO at Turbine, declared: "With the recent announcement of what are sure to be two blockbuster films based on The Hobbit and a sequel, we expect the success of the license and our relationship with Tolkien Enterprises to grow for years to come". The good news here is that Turbine is clearly serious about long hauling its commitment to LotRO. We may have a MMO that's aiming to give Everquest a run for its money on longevity. And that must surely mean, in today's crowded MMO market, that Turbine will produce the updates, the content and the innovation it needs to make LotRO a critical and financial success.
The bad news for Turbine is that they are running on a tight leash. All established intellectual properties tend to reduce innovation and force developers to make games that adhere, sometimes too tightly, to the precious material they are based upon. That's the reason we haven't seen any good Star Trek games in the last few years. That's the reason the Marvel Universe Online got canceled recently. It's certainly one of the reasons that makes Star Wars Galaxies a MMO that's hard to get into. Blizzard, with its World of Warcraft, arguably the most successful MMO out there, benefited from the fact that it could develop the game and the backstory at the same time. Turbine, on the other hand, has to develop LotRO while being unable to touch the backstory in any way. And this could prove to be an issue as the game further develops and needs to expand.
With some fan sources detailing plans for LotRO game expansion up until early 2013, it seems that Turbine is just preparing its ground for further LotRO related updates to come.