Age of Conan nets 415,000 subscribers
And Funcom has more MMOs to come.
Funcom has told us that Age of Conan has 415,000 subscribers and enjoyed "one of the largest PC launches in this decade."
Over 800,000 copies have been sold, according to Q2 financial papers, and most of the people playing are educated males around 29 years old, thank you for asking.
The focus for the game going forward is largely on PvP and high-end content - as well as adding new areas to explore, new guild and gameplay additions, plus new armour, raid gear and items.
Demos are planned at some point, apparently, which we presume means free trials of some sort. Regional expansion is another part of the plan.
As are new games, both casual and larger-scale MMOs. Funcom has Java-based and web-based online worlds in development, and one appears to be piratical with ships that fly. Shiny.
Both have been spurred on by the success of games such as RuneScape and MapleStory, and are due out sometime next year.
The Secret World, on the other hand, is the fully-fledged MMO being worked on by a team of around 40 people. This we heard about in May 2007; a science-fiction world within a world, set in real-life locations such as London where portals to a hidden world lie in wait.
Like Harry Potter then, only less with the wands and more with the zombies, as the first screenshots seem to imply. We were told a while ago that Ragnar Tørnquist, the man behind The Longest Journey and Dreamfall was at the helm of the project, which still carries no release date.
The Secret World is in development for PC and Xbox 360, and you can take a look at the first screenshots right now. We expect PC is the lead platform in a similar way to Age of Conan, which is still due an Xbox 360 release at some point in the future.
The competition marked out by Funcom was Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft expansion The Wrath of the Lich King, both expected by the Age of Conan developer later this year.
Funcom also pointed to the BioWare "Star Wars MMO", which EA confirmed as an online Knights of the Old Republic game in July. Funcom thinks this will be out in 2010/2011.