Angelic pretender Aion threatens to knock king of fantasy games off its throne

Now there is a challenger for its crown: Aion, created by the South Korean company NCSoft. The game had already been ordered by more than 400,000 players across Europe and North America before its launch in Britain yesterday.

Like World of Warcraft, Aion gives players the chance to immerse themselves in a fantasy world alongside thousands of other people. Its unique hook is that each character in the world of Atreia is a winged, angelic warrior who can engage in combat with monsters or other players.

Even more dramatic than those battles, however, is the battle between NCSoft itself and its arch rival — Blizzard Entertainment, the creator of World of Warcraft.

With 11.5 million subscribers around the world, World of Warcraft has secured Blizzard as the most profitable and influential company in the rapidly growing online games market.

NCSoft, however, is far from being an upstart challenger to the throne. The Seoul-based company was one of the pioneers of online videogames, launching titles such as Lineage and Lineage II, which, at their peak, boasted more than four million subscribers and helped to create the thriving market for online games across the Far East.

With Aion, NCSoft hopes to regain at least some of its former prestige as the industry’s top dog. The early signs are positive — not only had 400,000 players signed up before Aion had even been launched but they were so keen to get online that they flooded the service, causing queues of more than an hour to access the game.

“World of Warcraft’s success has inspired lots of similar games in recent years,” said Tom Bramwell, editor of the UK videogames site Eurogamer.net. “But most of them fail to scrape 500,000 subscribers, let alone the millions Blizzard gets. Aion’s success could be significant.”

In South Korea, where Aion came out last November, it became the country’s most-played online game within two days of being opened up to the public. Today, after launches in China and Taiwan this year, the game is thought to have 3.5 million paying subscribers across Asia. This makes it easily the most successful launch of an online game since World of Warcraft, or WoW, appeared five years ago.

“I’m really looking forward to trying out Aion, as are a lot of my friends,” said Melvin Tan, an avid online gamer who has been a WoW player for four years. “The artwork is amazing — I love the hyper-real visuals and characters. I don’t know if I’ll switch for good, but I think a lot of people who play WoW will probably try it out.”

Creating game services demands enormous investment and effort, but the financial reward involved in a hit product on the scale of World of Warcraft makes the risk worthwhile. Subscribers to games such as WoW and Aion pay a monthly fee as well as buying a copy of the game for about £35 and expansion packs every year or two for about £20 each. Vast secondary markets exist for merchandise, events and virtual items in the game. Blizzard has even licensed the rights to turn WoW into a film.

One might expect that even the launch of Aion would not cause the Californian company to lose much sleep. The problem is that Aion arrives against a backdrop of huge upheaval in World of Warcraft. “Blizzard is effectively ripping up and rebuilding the game for the next expansion,” Mr Bramwell said. “It will be interesting to see how they do this, because it is well behind contemporary PC and console games in visual terms.”

No online game has ever managed to sustain its growth past this point. But players such as Mr Tan are looking forward to the changes. “I think it’s great that they’re taking risks,” he said. “You need constant revolution to keep a game like this fresh. I’ve got confidence that they’ll get it right.”

No related posts.