14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest MMO launch of the year so far has been, without question, Funcom's Age of Conan, a game that takes the barbarian setting and turns it into a backdrop for players vs. environment and players vs. player combat.
But now Funcom, despite the launch, has seen its share value drop from 54 dollars on launch day to less than 24 dollars at the moment. The downward spiral of the share price might mean some financial trouble for the company, especially if it continues at this pace in the future.
The game seemed to be a market success ever since the pre-order stage. Close to a million people got it early and the Collector's Edition of Age of Conan sold very quickly. On launch the game sold more than 1 million copies in a short time frame, even taking over the top spot in videogame sales charts in the launch week.
Despite more than 5 million sold copies of the game it seems that retaining players has proved to be a daunting task for the developers. The game is interesting in the early part, but the mainly single player experience in Tortage has put some players off, while others complained that there was not much content for high level players.
The patch policy that Funcom adopted, which focused on quick changes to the game delivered via updates twice a week, was also over-ambitious, as the patches themselves often broke one aspect of the game while fixing another. The developer has adopted another policy recently, but the damage was already done and some players left the game forever.
An MMO cannot survive if it cannot keep a core of dedicated high level players in the game world and Age of Conan seems to be failing this task, with the financial results signaling a deepening concern with Funcom and its MMO. Let's hope they can turn things around and not suffer fates like those of Auto Assault or Hellgate London.