We poked fun at Turbine last August when they announced LOTRO had “over 4 million characters.” Earlier this month Funcom proudly announced they had reached their “One Million Copies Shipped” milestone. Shipped. Not subscribers, not boxes sold, just boxes shipped. Today Funcom’s at it again with their press release stating they’ve surpassed 700,000 registered users.
I’ll give Funcom the benefit of the doubt: since Age of Conan’s release last month, they’ve sold over 70% of those shipped boxes. It’s been on top of NPD’s sales charts. However, this is right up there with “4 million characters” in that it is not an accurate representation of how many active subscribers the game has. Within the small circle of blogs and forums I frequent only a minority of those users planned on continuing their subscription beyond their initial free month, and many of those remaining only planned on playing until Warhammer. Even on the test server this past month, the global chat had many long-time beta testers who, like myself, were not interested in playing the live game. I freely admit that is a small sub-section of players, but based solely upon that and my own blatant “meh, been there, done that” attitude toward the game, I can’t help but wonder if Age of Conan has already peaked?
On the other hand, I do think it has enough grit to attract a lot of people from the tamer environs of other titles once the more serious issues have been addressed. Perhaps by releasing prematurely and taking advantage of the summer dry spell when no other AAA titles were releasing, Funcom saw a huge spike but will also suffer a huge trough as they see a mass exodus. However, in a few months when performance is better, content is patched in, and overall “things work” perhaps word of mouth will cause another influx of players, both new and returning, who may actually stay for more than a short visit?
Tags: MMO Gaming
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