It's still a good time to be in the business of massive multiplayer online games – provided your company is Blizzard. World of Warcraft (WoW) has just under 12 million subscribers, and its two expansions have each sold more than four million copies. Compare that to Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, which sold over one million copies at launch, yet now has fewer than 100,000 active subscribers and half of its original servers in use.
So where did these games go wrong and what did WoW do right? Can these games fight back, or is there only room for one game in this business? That's what we're here to discover.