One million signed up for AoC beta by the end

by Samuel Axon May 13th 2008 at 7:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Age of Conan, Launches, New titles, News items

Age of Conan's beta test has concluded, and the retail launch is only a few days away, so it's a perfect time for Funcom to start (or rather, continue) hyping the game to the Nth degree. What better way to convince people to play it that than to make the argument: "everyone else is doing it!" Funcom announced on the AoC community website that the AoC beta has surpassed 1,000,000 sign-ups.

A little over a month ago we reported that Warhammer Online had hit the same landmark, and our readers had some interesting comments about how much this landmark really matters. Now is an especially good time to ask that question -- some players might not be buying AoC because of performance and stability issues in the IGN open beta event. It's not a stretch to bring into question the true function of a beta (is it marketing, or technical testing?), as well.

Does it matter? We don't know, but we'll find out soon enough.

Tags: 1-million, 1000000, age-of-conan, beta, closed-beta, funcom, launch, marketing, one-million, open-beta, sign-up, sign-ups, signup, signups

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Alarie said on 7:12PM 5-13-2008

Wonder how many of those million used multiple email accounts to sign up to try and increase their chance of getting in beta.

Lewie said on 7:28PM 5-13-2008

Yeah 1/3 of the entire sign up population is duplicates.

Leshrac said on 7:29PM 5-13-2008

Lol, I agree, lets face it - beta's today are nothing more then demos. My guess would be that maybe 30%, 40% of those people would become paying customers? And probably half of those people have pc's that will actually run the game.

Bragging that 1 million people registered to download a free game is nothing to brag about, sorta like Mythic boasting about the number of beta applications they received - tell you what, let me know when the subscriber numbers come out?

briannewton said on 12:50AM 5-14-2008

All it does is show general interest level. Has nothing to do with the quality of the game.

Also, I'm pretty sad that people might not buy the game because of performance and stability problems. They've released multiple patches to the closed beta such that while my system (8800 GTS 320 meg, AMD dual core 2.3 ghz, 2 gigs ram) chugged and often stuttered at medium settings in the open beta, now it's sailing along at 25+ fps constant at high settings.

Oh well, if the game is good positive word of mouth will bring people back regardless of a rocky beta.