14 DAY TRIAL // Funcom announces that it is releasing its Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures MMO on Steam for the price of 44.99 $. The game will also continue to be available through brick and mortar retailers and as a digital download offered through Funcom's own servers.
EVE Online from CCP was the first MMO to be released on Steam and other companies are now getting ready to offer MMO clients online, like Electronic Arts and NCsoft, although they will probably create their own custom distribution solutions rather than rely on Steam.
Age of Conan was launched earlier in the year and it managed to sell very quickly, at one time even topping the sales charts and exhausting its pre-order supply. The game is based on the world of Conan the Barbarian and promises to deliver fun combat, a fleshed out background and interesting quests. Some players have been complaining that the higher level characters have little to no experience in the MMO and that balancing issues make the game less fun than it should be.
The company has repeatedly said that it plans to address all the issues that cropped up in the initial stages of the game, but so far only balancing has been improved via patches. There's also talk of an expansion coming during 2009, with a new race introduced and fresh content for high level characters. Funcom also says that it is working on an Xbox 360 version of the MMO, but this was repeatedly delayed and is now scheduled for sometime in 2009.
The MMO currently has more than 400,000 subscribers, which makes it a moderate success. The problem is that two other games will be launched in the coming month, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and the Wrath of the Lich King Expansion for World of Warcraft, that could draw a lot of players away from Age of Conan.