JS: Our licenses -- and not accidentally so -- for The Hobbit and the trilogy are massively multiplayer online for all platforms and all regions. We have the ability to do that. We got the ability because we think it's valuable. We want to be able to reach the widest possible audience. As for whether we have a specific focus on that now, not necessarily. But that is definitely an alternate future available to us. But first things first. Before we think about doing anything else other than what we're doing, we have to make sure that we're doing what we're doing for our current audience better than anybody else.

AM: Right. MMO players and PC players.

JS: The market's going to evolve anyway, and this product's going to be around for a long time, so it's going to evolve with the market. Right now, we're still taking the PC game that we built and making sure that it grows into a global audience. That's a big enough focus right now.

I'm curious about the in-game economics of The Lord of the Rings Online. Recently Gala-Net signed on to work with real money traders. I was wondering what you thought about that sort of thing -- gold farming and real money trading -- and how you're dealing with that.

JS: The relationship between in-game economy and real-world money has been a topic of discussion since these games have been online. It's never going away, and that discussion is going to accelerate. There's a lot of people out there right now who make a living in that business. Some of them live in the United States, and some don't. It's the nature of doing business in the online space right now.

We recognize that this is going on, but we also very clearly and officially made it clear that we don't support it, and we don't think that's a good thing for our game, and that it's against our terms of service to do that. And we enforce that pretty significantly. In fact, we spend a fair amount of time and energy figuring out who's doing it with the sole intent of exploiting the game to create income for themselves, and who don't care about the health of the community and the health of the game.

At the end of the day, where our bread gets buttered is from our subscribers, and we need to protect the world that they're subscribing to be in, to be the world that they want it to be. That's our focus. It's like everything else. Where the industry and the world is going, we don't know. There's a lot of people out there experimenting with stuff, and there are certainly companies out there that are trying to take advantage of the situation. Our actions certainly speak for whether we think that's where we want to go. We're not participating in that, and it's a choice to not participate in that.

There's companies out there like Sony Online for example -- with Station Exchange -- that are experimenting with what's that like. Does it make any sense to create an environment for people where they actually want to be in that kind of environment? I don't know. But we know it's a big issue, and we know that it's not going away, and we also know that it's something that's very delicate and something that should not be rashly fooled around with. Right now, we're staying course. It's a full-time job to try and keep up with it.

AM: Unfortunately, we're a victim of our own success. If you're a successful game, then the gold farmers will come. So we deal with them, and we deal with helping our customers, and we have ways of identifying large transactions and police. The customer service guys probably look at it like that, but I look at it like, "Great! They're gold farmers! That means we're a hit!" I mean, that's how I looked at it at first, but obviously it is a big concern. That's Jeffrey's point. Our concern is to make sure that players are having a great time playing the game.

The appeal of The Lord of the Rings Online is that you're in Tolkien's world and anything that would break that experience would be pretty negative.

JS: It's also hard because -- and I think we've been very successful at it so far -- people have commented that our community feels like a really healthy, self-supported, mature community. Sometimes game communities can be rough, just because of the nature of the competitiveness and the nature of the age range of people playing, and this is a pretty mature, fun place to be a part of.

You mentioned that you have a demographic?

AM: We're trying, now that we've been out for six months, to get an idea of a player profile. I don't know a lot of the details, but when I saw the initial round of research collected, the most interesting thing that struck me is that a third of our player base is over 35. Which I think went back to our predictions at launch, that we were going to bring a lot of people into MMOs for the first time, or bring in people who have never tried one, because they're going to come for Lord of the Rings first and for the MMO second. We also have a strong enough game that's bringing in core MMO-players from our games and our competitors' games to give it a try, because it's a triple-A MMO.

But the age, I think that's the most interesting. I think when you look at other games, it's a younger crowd. They have their own subculture with leetspeak and all this other stuff, and it's very tough for someone who's not from that community to come in and go, "What are these people talking about?" The accessibility of the game resonates in the community. It's very successful. You can ask for help and there are people there who will help you. It's things like that.

JS: The whole thing tells us that the opportunity that we thought was there is there with this IP and the game we're building, and the accessibility of the game that we're building, which we're continually trying to make better, to really reach out to a broader audience. When we first launched the game, your first audience is going to be your MMO player. Those are the people who are going to understand the game that we're building, who are zealous to have a new one to play, and so there's a lot of focus on that, for the people who want to play these kinds of games.

We're just at the very beginning to get the word out to a much broader group of people. That's why you'll look around and start seeing other people talking about Lord of the Rings in different types of places than you might normally hear people talking about games, because this is something that a larger group of people are going to be interested in. The market's already kind of going that way already.