MMO Gamers

Currently I’m patching Warhammer and will shortly (I hope) be in the Open Beta.  I hadn’t received my Beta keys in time to make it into the Preview Weekend and as a result wasn’t invited into the aptly named Preview Weekend +, so have had to wait for the official Open Beta start time.  So how will WAR’s Open Beta and the official release soon after affect Funcom’s title, Age of Conan?

I’m going to play with some figures and these are only arbitrary.  We’re led to believe that Age of Conan sold 800,000 units.  At $50 USD each that’s $40 million for the first month.  My sources are quite dubious mind you.  We’re also led to believe that Age of Conan still has 400,000 subscribers.  If I make the assumption that they’ve had 400k subs since after the 30 days of included time then we’re into our third month of paid subscribers.  So (400,000 x 15)3 = 18 million.  So Age of Conan has generated close to $60 million, of which only a part is going into Funcom’s bank account.

At $18 million a month Age of Conan isn’t a bad little earner and I can’t imagine anyone would pull the plug.  But we are nearing the end of month four of AoC’s release and we have the impending launch of Warhammer,   How many subs will AoC have by October?  I don’t know how much it cost to develop AoC; whether Funcom’s seriously in the red or perhaps Anarchy Online funded a lot of the development costs.  Funcom also has another title in development, The Secret World, whether that sees the light of day or is Vaporware we’ll have to wait and see.

I think AoC has a reasonable amount of loyal fans and we may even see the game improve significantly over time.  There’s no doubt WAR and Lich King will hurt its subscriber base but I think it will be around for a while yet, with perhaps only 50 to 100k subs.