Turbine Inc. has announced that since going free-to-play in September 2009, the Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited playerbase has increased to more than one million active users. The game was originally released in 2006 as Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach and required players to pay a monthly fee. The game never managed to achieve mainstream success, and was announced to go free-to-play in the United States in June 2009.
Though the game is free to play, users can still sign up as a subscriber which will give them access to additional content and features. Turbine revealed that transactions in the Dungeons & Dragons Online store are three times as high as the industry average (per player), and that the overall revenue of the game has increased by 500% since it was re-launched as a free-to-play game. In fact, the number of subscribers has doubled since last September, despite the fact that a subscription is now completely optional to players.
The game celebrates its fourth birthday on the 28th of February, and Turbine states that it is “just getting started with more adventure packs, more store items, and other innovative features coming in the major updates we have planned throughout 2010.”
Good on this game for a successful switch. I’m curious how it holds up when Guild Wars 2 comes out though.