Free LOTRO earns Turbine twice as much as before

"It’s still fairly early, but we’ve had a really successful start," Adam Mersky, Turbine's director of communications, told Ars. "We’ve had over a million new registered users come into the game and our monthly revenue has doubled. We’re only six weeks in, but basically we’re making twice as much a month now than before when we could only make it off subscription revenue."

The game is set up in a similar way to DDO. Players can still subscribe, but there's now also a free-to-play option, coupled with a brand-new LOTRO store. Here, players can buy everything from additional quests and expansions to new clothes and even skill buffs, or tomes, as they're called in the game. And players, both free and subscribers, have flocked to the store. “We’re having over half our (player) base use the store, that’s almost four times the industry average," said Mersky.