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Guild Wars hits the 6 million milestone
Just in time for their fourth anniversary celebrations, ArenaNet have announced that Guild Wars has sold over six million copies. Coincidence? We think not but it's still a remarkable milestone for this popular MMO. Remember that market leader World of Warcraft has 11.5 million players worldwide and is subscription based. Guild Wars meanwhile, is free-to-play (plus box costs) and only a few months younger than WoW.ArenaNet are understandably chuffed about the whole thing, particularly their studio head, Mike O'Brien: "We are humbled by how gamers have responded to Guild Wars over the past four years, and we are proud that the game and its community have helped to continually shape, define, and expand the genre. Our subscription-free business model has proven to be a big hit with gamers, bringing an enormous and diverse online community to the game."
Age of Conan tops the million shipped mark
Since the launch of Age of Conan, Funcom has been enjoying almost constant successes in the media and in the marketplace. However meaningful you feel critical responses are to an MMO, they continue to be strikingly positive (though with a few exceptions, as always). They've knocked huge titles like Grand Theft Auto 4 off of the top of sales charts, and internal metrics have already put the existing player base above 400,000. In the latest milestone for the Norwegian developer, they've announced that they have surpassed one million units shipped worldwide in less than three weeks.While units shipped is a fuzzier number than units sold in terms of a metric for success, Funcom's VP of sales and marketing is already calling this the biggest MMO launch since World of Warcraft. While we highly doubt that Funcom is even going to approach the numbers that Blizzard has been slinging for years, what's clear is that their game is a tremendous success by most standards. What will be key for them at this point is building on this initial flood of users and doing their best to retain the subscribers they have. It doesn't take long to go from shiny new title to disappearing from your company's quarterly financial report.
