Vice president and general manager of Codemasters Online Gaming (COG), David Solari, has revealed a target of over a million players for the division’s upcoming Lord of the Ring Online (LOTRO) title and admitted intentions to compete directly with Blizzard’s genre-leading World of Warcraft.
“I think the goal [for LOTRO] would be over a million subscribers in the west,” said Solari, speaking at the COG LiVE event in Warwick, UK, yesterday. “World of Warcraft is such a benchmark now, but if something’s going to do it it’s going to be a Lord of the Rings brand that lets people play in that environment and experience that content. It’s got to have probably the best chance of competing with it.”
LOTRO, developed by US developer Turbine, is scheduled for a Q4 release. Demoed in fully playable form at the event by executive producer Jeff Steefel, the initial release is to include the content from the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring, with the rest of the trilogy to be added as the game evolves.
This goes right into the group with Campion (Eve-Online clueless producer who luckily quit shortly after release) claiming that Eve would have 100k of players online at the same time (and the servers supporting that without troubles) and Marc Laukien (MutableRealms clueless president) claiming that Wish’s target was at least 100k subscribers.
Why people in the high positions never have even remotely a clue?
Adding my own guesswork:
1M of players is laughable, 500k is laughable. Anything below that depends solely on the quality of the game.
Imho the best scenario they have is 150k to 200.
(I think I’ve been excessively optimistic, this game may never see the light of the day)