Why The Lord of Rings: Living Card Game is going to Steam Early Access

Fantasy Flight Interactive’s debut game is The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game, an adaptation of Fantasy Flight Games’ groundbreaking tabletop game that Asmodee Digital is publishing. Living Card Game is a trademark of the gamemaker, and this PC version will bring a different economic model to a $1 billion card game market — no randomized packs, with a focus on a narrative experience, not a competitive one full of foes wielding the hot netdeck of the week.

It’s coming to Steam’s Early Access program sometime this quarter. And it makes sense that Fantasy Flight would choose this pathway. While some studios like how this enables them to make money by selling a game as they continue working on it, the model’s greatest value may be in how it enables designers to collect feedback from players. In our story earlier today, community manager Luke Walaszek mentioned several times how comments from people watching developers play on stream have already shaped development, and this is before folks are even playing it.