A few days ago, Turbine has opened the “Dungeons & Dragons Online” servers for people who pre-ordered the game. It took a catasser a whooping 5 days to reach max level. And there is zero high-end content. DDO is somewhat similar to Guild Wars: it’s an over-instanced turd. In contrast to DDO, GW is €10 cheaper, does not ask for a €15 monthly subscription fee and offers high-end content in form of a PvP system that many people enjoy.
It makes me wonder what Turbine’s business model for DDO is. The catass crowd will likely quit before the first subscription fee is due, the core gamers will hit that wall after two months max and even the casuals won’t be that far behind. Subscriber retention will be horrible, unless Turbine has a solid work-flow for providing major content updates at least once a months in place.
They’re either banking on people sticking around in hope for content patches or they simply see the subscription model as a means to earn another 15-30 bucks on top of the retail price. It seems a bit fishy. Why go with a subscription fee model when you don’t have the content to retain customers?