Age of Conan closes more than half of their server

One of the most hyped up games to come out in 2008 was Age of Conan. Sadly, the launch of the game was a different story. Stellar reviews and problems with the game itself caused a major downfall in popularity of the game.

After several months of fixing bugs and putting in content to save the game in the long run, it was already too late. The gamers already moved on to other games and quickly Age of Conan was another forgotten game to those gamers that were hyping it in 2008. The reputation the game had before the launch was gone just like that and soon servers were emptied out.

Funcom has planned to have the servers merge to help keep the remaining players they have playing the game. They revealed they will be cutting 49 servers to just 18 servers in total.

In North American and Oceanic regions Funcom will merge 24 servers into 6 servers. There will be only one PvP server and one PvE server to remain, with each to combine the populations of six or seven existing servers.

While in Europe, Funcom will let 12 servers remain due to the four languages. English language Euro servers are being cut from 13 to 4 only.

Server mergers is usually a way to tell that the game is in a very serious problem or just isn’t popular no more and ran its course. While some games bounce back because of a server merger, most of the time games tend to shutdown completely. This method is usually the last resort for MMO games to do to save it from shutting down completely, but also this will give the remaining players a better experience in the game. Funcom will still plan on launching their expansion and flush out more high end content for the game. Although, you might ask why Funcom does not shut down the game completely this is because Age of Conan is their only MMO that is making them money. Funcom has to wait until their next MMO game come out ‘The Secret World’- which will be release next year.

Seeing the economies and the new MMO games that are coming out this year we can all see that there will be more MMO games from last year to merge their servers.

________

OUCH!!! 49 TO just 18 servers!!!

How could they ever recoup their investment into this game

This was a great game.......the first 20 lvl that is, rest was a wasteland.

Ouch - yeah really!

18 servers is less than Dark Age of Camelot had when I played it - and it had 200,000 subscribers on average during those years.

Funcom was hoping for at least 1 million subs. Shortly after launch they had 750,000 playing AoC, but most probably on their free month. And now it's down at 200K subs if not less.

What a pity. The only hope now is Warhammer Online to have a chance at becoming a +1 million Western MMORPG besides WoW.

Wow!! damn, thats a Major cut in servers, thats like what around 70%?

Jeez...

Well WoW > All when it comes to PC MMO's anyway so. :D

That was the worst launched game I had ever been apart of. Huge amounts of content were messing, glitchy quests, and horrible performance. It got so bad that my computer instantly froze whenever I tried logging in. I most likely won't buy another Funcom game because of how much I looked forward to Age of Conan only to be so hugely disappointed.

They're still working on the 360 version correct?

Well, what can you say? The mmo market is a little saturated with the ones that are free... so why pay? And WoW just dominates the paid subscriber numbers.

Isn't this on lists of 360 exclusives? I think people should stop naming thisgame then (aka the exclusive wall of terror thread)

Did you just now see this? The merge happened over a week ago and it was in talks for over a month. Game is fine for now.

Nothing can really stand against WoW except for maybe ever EverQuest right now which I believe still holds a few million subscribers between EQ1 and EQ2. Course it had a good 5+ million people at one point till WoW killed everything.

At this point every company has to consider that if they go into the MMORPG market they stand very little chance in succeeding. Nothing is going to dethrone WoW at this point. KOTOR3/MMORPG won't last more then a few years, trust me.

kotor mmorpg is the only thing that hurt wow, because the "star wars" brand is vastly more popular . i still play ff11 online this march will be my 4th year playing it and i still enjoy it very much, i tried wow and hated it , so boring. i hope square-enix shows off their next mmorpg soon.