Remember all of those good times we all had playing the Age of Conan MMO? You don’t? Oh, well me neither and it’s probably because most of us never actually played the game.
Well on July 1st, Funcom re-released the game as Age of Conan: Unchained with a new free-to-play and subscribe-if-you-want-goodies business model to see if they could rejuvenate the title.
Guess what? It worked, proving that maybe the best way to get our money is to give everything to us for free.
Wait, what?
No but seriously, the new business model was actually a smart move from Funcom, and they report that more than 300,000 new players have rocked up to play ever since the relaunch.
They aren’t all just wheezin’ the juice though, because Arne Aas, who possibly has the funniest name I’ve seen all month and happens to be the Funcom CEO, said that they have “more than doubled the revenue generated from the gameâ€.
He also reckons that the servers “are booming with a fourfold increase in players during July†and that there’s a “positive development in subscriber numbersâ€.
According to the report from Eurogamer, the game also looks to benefit greatly from the release of the new, incredibly violent release of the new Conan: The Barbarian film, and Funcom are capitalizing on it by releasing a giant content pack alongside it that will take place years after the movie, but features similar characters and the result of events.
Nice move Funcom, I wonder if this will make a couple of other companies change up their strategies. Goodness knows that WoW is still pretty untouchable, even with great looking games like Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic on their way.
Source: Eurogamer.net
Last Updated: August 11, 2011