Funcom boasts 400,000 players in Age of Conan so far

by Michael Zenke May 26th 2008 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Launches, MMO industry, New titles

An official release from Funcom has announced that Age of Conan is one of the most successful PC titles "of all time." Since the game's release last Tuesday the Oslo company says that some 400,000 players have stalked the lands of Hyboria. A full half of those players are from the North American continent. If you recall, the company said that it had put roughly 700,000 boxes into the retail channel. Though they don't give specific numbers, the release says "an astounding number of concurrent gamers were logged on to the game, making Age of Conan one of the busiest MMOs in the western hemisphere." The official website received heavy traffic as well, with "2.2 million unique visitors" in the last ten days.

The release also notes the game's extremely positive reaction from review sites, with "the first 20 reviews [giving] Age of Conan an average score above 90%." Obviously that's some selective statistical selection, but generally the response among the playerbase seems to be fairly positive. Keen and Graev's decision to skip the game aside, everyone this blogger has talked to seems to be enjoying themselves. Even if Age of Conan isn't a "WoW-killer", or fails to retain these numbers beyond the next few months, it's clear that Funcom has a successful launch on their hands.

Says Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas, "This is just the beginning, and we already look forward to massive updates and cool new features. We believe our focus on making Conan unique and groundbreaking is a key reason for the initial success. This is a focus we will keep and reinforce, and players can expect continued quality and innovation as we enter a new era for the game."

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, breaking, funcom, launch, playerbase, statistics

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Kaonashi said on 2:46PM 5-26-2008

You quoted the press release wrong. Actually Funcom said, "Age of Conan is one of the fastest selling PC games of all time," not "one of the most successful PC titles of all time".

Moderndaydruid said on 2:51PM 5-26-2008

Conan kicks ass. I'm having a great time. However, Funcom needs to bust ass to fix bugs like the Trader, and get more high level content in quick, or they will not get sub renewals.

Still, I love the game. I see myself playing for at least 6 months. Beautiful game, combat is the best in the genre, and is the music and ambient sound.

Lurker28 said on 5:54PM 5-26-2008

There is always going to be bugs with an MMO but funcom has done a great job since I started playing the closed beta in January. I have been loving them ever since I set my foot in hyboria.

There are a good amount of little bugs and some balance tweaks/exploits to work on. However, nothing here is game breaking. I do agree that the traders need to be back up (they have not been up since the second day of Early Access), the longest WoW's auction how was ever down (that I can remember) was 2 days...and that was big.

Lets hope the pacing continues and Funcom can start working on their first big patch. They have released a few minor (easy fix) issue patches over the last couple days but nothing that is note worthy.

ScytheNoire said on 5:20AM 5-27-2008

Any one who ever says "WoW-killer" should automatically be put on ignore. Nothing will kill WoW but time. It's an aging game with lots of problems that come from the core design, and they can't be fixed. Blizzard is obviously already making a new MMO, and hopefully not one set in the Warcraft world, and it will most likely focus on fixing a lot of the core problems WoW has.

There will never be a "WoW-killer", only the evolution of the MMO franchise, which AoC is part of, and future games will also expand upon. MMO's evolve, and if your game can't evolve with the times (as EVE is designed to do), then it will simply die off.

phobic99 said on 7:52AM 5-27-2008

I don;t think many people said it was going to be a WoW killer for a number of reasons (higher system requirements, mature rating, unfamiliar lore *shrug*, etc).

That being said I stopped with WoW over a year ago and can easily say I'm never playing it again. AoC has it's flaws but I'm enjoying the game a lot for the time being.

razvan2588 said on 5:00PM 6-24-2008

i was a wow player but i'm not playing anymore. i'm sure after a few time all the players who explored the end game content will stop playing wow. my opinion about wow is simple now. blizzard improves the game with patches for making high amount of money. they way doing this is by making the game easyer for 90% of wow players who have gladiators for example. i'm sure any other game like eve for example where they don't release expansions every year and they release patches only for better graphics will be a wow killer. if age of conan will do this for sure it will be a wow killer coz many wow hardcore players are bored of having t6 wich means nothing in a few moths

danarchy said on 1:55PM 5-27-2008

I only have a few complaints with aoc so far (which for me is amazing...)

1) at lvl 40 my gear still looks like im some sort of medival homeless person. On average I think the clothes I washed up on the shore with looked nicer than my quest blues.

2) quests seem to petter out about lvl 34 so I find myself killing alot of grey mobs to complete low level quests

3) the chat system drives me freaking nuts

4) cant see group members on map unless there really close, and there is no "join groups instance" feature so you tend to end up in different instances until you enter a dungeon or something

That and some broken quest lines (the ancient pyramid?) are about my only complaints. Really having a blast even with those problems to be honest :)