According to Funcom, the develop of Age of Conan:Hyborian Adventures, the game amassed 700,000 subscribers in around a month.

With the game receiving a huge amount of hype prior to its release, with some believing it could challenge WoW's monopoly, the President of Blizzard decided to discuss the new MMORPG.

Mike Morhaime admitted that with the release of AoC has had an affect on WoW, "Age of Conan released with some initial success a couple of months ago, and we did see some of our players leave to try the game." explained Morhaime, "however, we've seen about 40 percent of those players return to World of Warcraft."

World of Warcraft currently has over 10.9 million subscribers and Morhaime expects Wrath of the Lich King the new WoW expansion, to be launched later this year, will convince more players to come back.

Morhaime said that the players who do decide to leave are often drawn back due to the content and services that Blizzard provides.

The Blizzard president also added that "another competitive advantage is our ability to amortize our development costs across more than 10 million subscribers spread out over three continents."

Edge