Would be nice if Turbine could clear up that tiny little issue for us.

P.S. Eve had its money spread about the globe and didn’t loose a ton of it to the collapse of its local banks. They made a press release to tell their players not to worry, they weren’t going to suddenly vanish. Nice how some companies can take the time out to relieve their customers fears.

Good point, Eve Online is another example. I’m not sure how successful they really are at this late date, but they certainly improved after launch, and I’m sure they have more users than DDO, if not LOTRO. I see they claim around 300K, which may perhaps be more than any American MMO except WoW.

Did CCP suffer from the Icelandic economic collapse?

Edit: Bah, typoed my handle.

(above is a quote)

EVE Online had a dismal first year or two. There’s a reason why CCP is often referenced in relation to success and that’s ‘cs of a focus upon their product. Did you know they were unable to pay their staff at one point in time?

DDO is a very solid MMO with an outstanding playstyle that is unmatched in other MMO’s. Only recently are some of these things being copied, and even then there is no equal. Anyone that has given DDO a chance would tell you that.

will be interesting to see what comes of this model in the MMORPG world…

What about Guild Wars?

It has been free online since 2005

http://www.guildwars.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_Wars

The games in the Guild Wars series were critically well received[4][5][6][7] and won many editor’s choice awards, as well as awards such as Best Value, Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), and Best Game.[8] Guild Wars was noted for being one of the few commercially developed games in the MMORPG genre to offer online play without subscription fees,[9] its instanced approach to MMORPG play,[10] and the quality of the graphics and play for computers with low specifications.[11] In April 2009, NCSoft announced that 6 million units of games in the Guild Wars series had been sold.[12]

It’s very rare for any MMO to recover from a bad launch. Anarchy Online is perhaps the only such game to do so, and its recovery was very modest — the fact you’ve probably never heard of it attests to that….

As an aside, LOTRO and DDO are not the next-most-popular MMOs after World of Warcraft, though this assertion is difficult to prove or disprove, as Turbine never releases subscription figures. However, you can make some rough estimates based on named game world deployment. LOTRO might possibly be one of the higher ranked American-owned-and-operated MMOs after WoW, but I would be surprised if it had 250,000 active subscribers, and there are many other MMOs worldwide with more subscribers than that.