The results are in: Lord of the Rings Online is making three times as much money as it was before it went free back in September.

This is a big win/win scenario for game developers. They have the opportunity to gain more users, as the barrier for entry is lower, and potentially make more money than their usual monthly fee from their most hardcore users. (Imagine $12.99 a month becoming $20 a month in additional quest packs and emergency mana potions…) I’m still hoping Blizzard will experiment with this for World of WarCraft.

Now, if only Turbine would work on OS X clients for their growing MMORPGs…

Now Turbine is going to see if they can replicate their success with another title: Lord of the Rings Online. It’s currently a subscription game, operating in much the same way as World of WarCraft with a $15 monthly subscription after you’ve already paid for a retail box or download.

It’s nice to see the more accessible freemium model gaining ground against the standard subscription route. It seems to work pretty well for both customers and the publishers. The question remains: will Blizzard give freemium a shot, what with their plateauing subscriptions? I’ve been hoping the MMORPG giant would give it a try for awhile.

The move to make Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play shows Warner Bros. is serious about making a big investment in the Lord of the Rings franchise, which some say may have peaked with the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. But Warner is betting that the interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is everlasting. That’s why it gathered together all of the game rights from Turbine and Electronic Arts. Warner also owns the film rights now.

Lord of the Rings Online goes free-to-play this fall [GamesBeat]

How did that turn out? DDO has had a 500% increase in revenue and their player base has effectively doubled. An interesting post over at Wow.com has the full story.

“Everyone can play through the content without ever getting anything from the store, and they’ll have a fine time of it. What we’re pretty proud of with the whole system is the fact that the player owns any content they buy.”

I pressed for a bit of clarification. He obliged by likening most subscription-based games, like WoW, to renting something. When you buy an expansion pack for WoW, you only have access to that content, or any content, while your subscription is active. If your subscription lapses, you can’t play what you bought anymore. “If you buy a content pack from the DDO store, on the other hand, it’s yours forever, regardless of whether you’re currently subscribed or not. If you’re normally a VIP and have a rough month financially, you can go back to the free-play model and still play what you purchased in the store,” Currie said.

What I’m wondering now is whether we’ll be seeing Turbine try to apply the same model to some of their other games, such as Lord of the Rings Online? (LOTR Online is sold in retail stores, and operates with a fee structure very similar to World of Warcraft‘s, so it doesn’t seem all that likely.) What effect will this have on the gaming industry, or on the content industry in general over time?