According to CEO Lars Buttler, Trion Worlds has spent just over $50 million on the development of their first MMO, Rift: Planes of Telara. The title has spent around four years in development due to various delays in the project. Buttler told Develop that the engineering of Trion’s own development platform contributed to the large budget, which he pointed to as an example of the company’s desire to succeed in the MMO space.
“Rift: Planes of Telara is already very ambitious because it is over $50 million in development,” he said. “One of the first questions we asked before we started the Rift project was, ‘why cannot online games be of the quality of videogames?’”
“We felt that, sooner or later, the whole [MMO sector] will have to go down this route.”
Since its founding in 2006, Buttler has worked to secure over $100 million in venture capitalist funding to spread over the company’s three projects. In addition to the aforementioned Rift, Trion is partnered with Petrogylph to develop End of Nations, billed as the first massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. Rift and End of Nations are slated to be released for PC sometime in 2011. The last project is an action MMO in collaboration with Syfy, but more details on that project have not been released.
