Aion is the single most pre-ordered MMO this year

by Krystalle Voecks on Sep 17th 2009 8:00PM

Fantasy, Aion, Launches, New titles, News items

In a piece of news that we're betting surprises precisely nobody at all, Aion has just broken the 400,000 pre-order mark. What's notable about this number is that it's enough to make Aion the largest number of pre-orders on an MMO for 2009. As Aion is also holding strong in the Steam and Direct2Drive sales charts, we wonder how many more we'll see added to that number before the official launch next Tuesday.

With highly polished graphics, over two million words of quest text, and a series of tweaks to make Aion more Western-friendly, NCsoft seems to have finally hit the right stride with Western MMO gamers. That said, as we've learned from all the other games that have come before it, the real numbers that count are the retention numbers after the initial launch. Whether or not Aion is the goose that lays the golden egg - at least in terms of the Western markets - we'll have to wait and see.

Tags: aion, aion-the-tower-of-eternity, direct2drive, mmo, most-preordered-game, ncsoft, new-game, preorder, sales-figures, steam

Reader Comments (82)

Gee, just what the western market needs, another asian based MMORPG to fail catastrophically. They must have seen how well Lineage 2 did and figured it was a great business plan to attempt to court WoW players from an already great game, to one with asian influence and hardly any differential traits.

Note to Asia: We (normal western hemisphere human beings that aren't 15 years old and think pink hair and androgynous characters are cool) don't care for asian influenced games. We're not back in the 90's where games made from this region in the world actually mattered, or were preferred.

Wake me up when we get an MMORPG that actually improves upon WoW's concepts rather than copies. Until then I'll won't be resubbing to an MMORPG. I just have a strange feeling that game is Blizzard's next MMORPG.

And before you say I'm a WoW fanboy, I'm not. I haven't subbed to that game since 06, but I hardly see how this game is any different (read: better).