Age of Conan Ships A Kirstie-Load of Pre-Order Boxes
By 
Hib in
Age of Conan, features on
May 19th, 2008
Up, down, good, bad…the buzz surrounding Funcom’s new Age of Conan has been mixed, to put it mildly, with some saying the game would flop right out of the gate.
This, of course, is why you don’t listen to forum warriors crying “I’m gonna cancel my pre-order!11!!” during beta.
Funcom has announce that it has shipped 700,000 units world wide for its May 20th launch date, which includes 110,000 units of the special edition box.
MMOCrunch went on to make the inevitible comparison; I mean, c’mon…you didn’t think we’d make it through an entire AoC story without Blizzard’s little game being mentioned, did you?
To put that in perspective, World of Warcraft, which didn’t do a global launch, launched with 250,000 units in North America then a few months later in Europe with 280,000. Even if you add that up, that still puts AoC 170,000 units over WOW. This makes Age of Conan the highest pre-order number for any global launch of an original PC game, ever.
Make no mistake…shipping 700,000 pre-orders is a great accomplishment…that’s $35 million right up front. Of course, that’s American dollars, so with the current weakness of the dollar it translates to about 8 krone in Norway, but that’s beside the point. A nice start for AoC, indeed.
Nice starts in the MMORPG industry are overrated.
Okay…I’ll give you a moment to stop screaming at the monitor and I’ll continue.
The above stat on World of Warcraft illustrates that point nicely. WoW didn’t dominate the MMORPG market on the strength of its launch sales; it took over the market based on keeping it’s players in the game, and bringing new players in. Running a successful MMO isn’t a five-yard dash…it’s a marathon, and only the fit survive everyone survives, even if they only have three subscribers, and those three are all family members of the dev team. But only the fit really succeed.
And no, that doesn’t mean that I believe you have to hit WoW’s sales and subscription numbers to be a success…far from it. But no company starts development with the goal of “Let’s see if we can get enough back to cover our costs, and maybe a small profit.”
Let’s look at it from a different angle…when Blizzard released The Burning Crusade, a little over two years after WoW had gone live, it set sales records:
According to Blizzard, and based on reports from select distributors, 2.4 million copies of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade were sold worldwide in the expansion set’s first 24 hours at retail.
Compare AoC’s 700k sales to that 2.4 million for BC, and it doesn’t look as good, especially when you remember that the 2.4 million in sales over a 24 hour period was people paying for additional content for a game most had already played for two years.
Yes, I realize that this is comparing apples and monkeys (which is much more fun than
comparing apples and oranges), but the point is this…to everyone that uses the impressive pre-order sales for AoC as an indicator that it’s going to be “the new WoW”…you can’t go by that. Want proof? Vanguard sold 200,000 copies, and has since dropped quite a bit. Meanwhile, EVE Online had a very limited sales figure for its launch, and has since grown by an astronomical amount.
If you went by launch-day sales figures, Vanguard would beat the stuffing out of EVE, and be much more successful. Someone go look and see if that’s the case…I’ll wait here.
I’m not saying that AoC won’t compete with World of Warcraft…what I am saying is that it’s stupidity personified to try to judge based on the pre-order number. Check back in a year or two…if Funcom has over two million people willing to plunk another $40 down for additional AoC content, then we’ll talk. Otherwise…it’s a great launch for AoC, and an accomplishment worth bragging about.
But it’s not time to start crowing yet. A bad launch can kill an MMO…a great launch can lay the foundation for success; it’s not success in and of itself.
| 2.5 |
If you liked this, then you should seek medical attention - right after you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
May 20th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Shipping 700,000 copies is not the same as having 700,000 pre-orders. Nonetheless, the comparison to WoW still stands since the WoW figures mentioned are for numbers of boxes created.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:57 am
Very true, and I should have made that a bit more clear up there (translation:I shouldn’t have said the wrong dern thing). I just get a kick out of everyone trying to use “Hollywood Metrics” to judge MMORPGs. True, a Hollywood release lives or dies at the box office by its opening weekend take, but a blockbuster opening day for an MMORPG can actually hurt the game if it still needs work.
That’s because, if a movie tanks, the studio still has DVD revenue to look forward to. In the MMO business, if players leave after a bad launch, they more than likely won’t be back…they don’t have MMOs at Blockbuster or Netflix.
People are going to have to get used to the fact that MMORPGs are a completely different animal from the motion picture and music industries (heck, they’re different than non-online computer and console games), and stop getting excited (or depressed) over the wrong things.
Thanks for the clarification on my typically thumb-fingered attempt at explaining things above, Tholal. (Nice blog, by the way.)