GamesBloggo - Your source on game news! January 2009

Funcon announces that 400 thousand players are already playing in the official Age of Conan servers. The MMORPG, which has a low-fantasy scenario, was launched last May. It’s the first step into trying to reach the numbers from World of Warcraft, which currently hosts more than 10 million players on their servers.

The great success of Age of Conan resulted into a lack of copies from retail, not only in the United States, but also in Europe.

The news came from the Japanese game house Capcom, responsible for the famous title. The launch of Resident Evil 5 will not come after March 2009. The game is expected to be available for Playstation 3 and XBox 360.

Capcom is hoping to sell 2.3 million copies of the next chapter on the famous Horror series.

Not only great reviews from the specialized press, but also huge commercial numbers, and Grand Theft Auto IV is in the Guiness Records for being the entertainment product that sold more copies in its first 24 hours of selling. The game sold 3.6 million copies in its first release day, with revenues of 310 million dollars.

Before the record established by GTA IV, Halo 3 had the first position amongst all the game titles, with revenues of 170 million dollars in just one day. Rockstar also declared that the revenues for the first week of commercialization amount to 500 million dollars.

Over a million players have registered to the Open beta of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, as announced by the norwegian software house Funcom, who launched the beta teat on May, 1st. This game version allows the players to reach up to level 13 and test a few player vs. player options.

It’s a record for western MMORPGs, even if it’s very unlikely that all the beta test players will become effective players when the game launches in the end of May.

800.000 users have subscribed to the Clan of Conan newsletter. The posts on the official forums, written in four different languages, reached the 115.000 mark.

id Software has started the developing stages for the fourth chapter of the DooM game series. For that exact reason, the Software house from Texas has increased the numbers on their developing team. There were no further details released about the gameplay or game characteristics, but it’s easy to presume that the same technology used in Rage will also be applied to DooM 4.

“The DooM series is part of the id Software DNA and it requires the most brilliant minds and talents in the industry”, says Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software. “For id Software, it’s essential to have the most creative minds in order to develop games that keep the same quality as our previous titles”.

If the Tech 5 engine is confermed as the game’s graphic technology choice, DooM 4 will be most likely released for the PC, Playstation 3 and XBox 360 plaftorms. The most recent chapter of the series was released on August 2004 and had an innovative graphic engine.