Earlier this week, both Funcom and Turbine started giving away virtual goods within Age of Conan and Asheron’s Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online, respectively.  Funcom hopes to draw new players in and lure back former players with free trials and exclusive virtual items.  Turbine, however is on another path, with their virtual goods giveaway being a bit more of the ‘D’oh!  Our bad – here’s some free stuff’ variety.

Funcom – Age of Conan

Yesterday marked the kickoff of a new Funcom initiative.  Watching player numbers decline, Funcom’s not about to let their investment simply slip away, and they’ve now opened a free trial program.  This trial lets new users try out the game for 7 days at no cost.  Since Funcom’s announcement of shrinking server populations, the company desperately needs to draw in new players as well as retain current ones.  To this end, Funcom is going 1up on the free trial, and now sweetening the deal with tossing a few virtual goods in Conan’s backpack.

MMORPG.com and Eurogamer.com, Funcom partner sites, are now holding the keys (literally) to these new AoC freebies.  Both sites were issued 20,000 trial keys, one lot to be used for North American gamers, and the other for European gamers.  These are the promo keys needed to obtain the three unique virtual items.  These items are designed to allow for easier and faster early gameplay.  Items include:

• Totem of Origins – designed to allow players to teleport back to their home city from anywhere in the world after level 20
• Bag of Holding – an über backpack designed to increase users’ overall inventory space
• Enruned Kosalan Ring – increases all damage dealt by the wearer

Note: these items are available ONLY through the MMORPG.com and Eurogamer.com keys.  A free trial version of AoC is of course available directly from the Funcom site, but alas, no free stuff.  And if three free virtual goods weren’t enough to get players interested, Funcom is also tossing in the family truckster and roof rack as a bonus if a trial is converted to a fully paid version.  What I mean by that is Funcom is giving new paying customers a Snow Mammoth mount (family truckster) and a Mammoth Bag (roof rack) that are designed to further speed up early to mid level playing.  What’s interesting to note is that these potentially five free virtual goods are not simply cosmetic upgrades, but items that will significantly improve player’s performance and speed through the game.

This raises two interesting points.  First being, I clearly remember Funcom’s AoC presentation at last years Games Convention in Leipzig where they told press members that they’re really struggling with end game content.  Has this end game content been significantly improved (and better yet, tested on a massive scale)?  It would appear so, as Funcom is obviously making a push to move new players through early stages quite quickly and on board to take on the darkest of dungeons.  The second question raised is whether or not Funcom is testing the microtransactions waters with AoC?  Remember, they’ve got at least two free-to-play titles in the works that we know about.  Could Funcom even be considering opening AoC up to an in-game item mall, or do they want to stick to the tried and true method of subscriptions, all the while working on free-to-play in the back room?

Turbine – Asheron’s Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online

Server migration is never an easy task.  Especially when you’re running an MMO which sees literally no down time what so ever.  So when Turbine recently migrated servers for both Asheron’s Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online things weren’t exactly what you’d call ‘Smooth’.  The migration resulted in a significant amount of downtime, and as is standard industry practice with server downtime, Turbine extended all subscriptions by one day.  But the folks in Mass. didn’t stop there.  Turbine stepped up to the plate and started handing out the virtual goodies to eager MMO players.

This coming weekend all Asheron’s Call and D&D Online players will receive a +25% XP bonus as well as an increased rare item drop rate of virtual goods.  But wait….the Turbine goodness doesn’t stop here, as they’ve managed to turn a faux pas into a virtual goods teaser.  All users of D&D Online with active accounts during the downtime will receive a special in-game item when the next major patch is released later this summer.

Nice guys eh?  Well of course, but what’s more is that by giving away ‘free’ virtual goods within a game, Turbine is giving a ‘behind the curtain’ nod at the real-world financial value of in-game virtual items.  As with all goods and services, naturally distributing a large amount of one particular item immediately decreases it’s value of worth, but to the average player, the ‘Oooo.  Neat!’ factor far outweighs the ‘Aw man, it’s not worth as much anymore, ‘cause everybody has one’ factor.

Turbine has already clearly indicated that they’re interested in microtransactions, hiring a microtransactions manager.  Additionally, yesterday’s rumor mill was in full effect with reports that LotR was more or less ‘ready to go’ to be ported to a console experience (specifically the XboX 360) but had hit a snag as Turbine would like to feature the title as a free-to-play with microtransaction options, causing Gold vs. Silver XboX subscription headaches.

While perhaps not the best of circumstances to introduce players to virtual goods (and the associated advantages and downright cool factor), both Turbine and Funcom are using difficult situations to their advantage.  Both companies have free-to-play/microtransaction based projects in the works – so why not wet the appetites of their current customers through targeted promotions?  Brilliant folks.  Simply brilliant.

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• Age Of Conan Offers Free Trial (cinemablend.com)
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• Age of Conan still in development for Xbox 360 (joystiq.com)