The debates still going over Age of Conan's expected performance are revolving around the premise that Funcom will be dead in the water because you can't mass-market an MMO with such high system requirements.

I think that's misleading. I was never under the impression that Funcom was ever aiming to be a WoW-beating mass-market MMO.

There's plenty of room in the MMORPG market to carve out a niche.

• Licensed Conan / Hyborian world = Niche.
• M-Rated, adult content = Niche.
• Active combat system = Niche.
• Guild-centric Endgame (PvP Battlekeeps & PvE Cities) = Niche.

And add:

• High system requirements = Niche.

For me, niche isn't a bad word, in fact I think we need a whole lot more of these games to innovate within the MMORPG genre.

What Funcom is betting on, is that these points target their intended audience. That the same adults that will play an M-rated game are the ones likely to upgrade their PCs to do so. Or maybe they already have a suitable machine: note that the most common graphics chipset on the Steam survey is now the 8800, which by most benchmarks is today's fastest GPU.

The people who are going to be the most shocked or disappointed with Age of Conan are the ones who've become accustomed to playing WoW on laptops or underpowered pre-built PCs from the likes of Dell and eMachines. Granted, there are a lot of those folks and it's a normal expectation to play ever game on a PC you've bought in the past year... but that says more about the sad state of standard PC hardware.

The funny thing is, given the niche, I expected Age of Conan to launch quietly, almost un-noticed. I underestimated how many bored MMO players out there are eager to get their hands on something new.

It's a shame this stuff has overshadowed many of the more interesting features planned for Age of Conan. I expect to talk a lot more about those in coming weeks though. =)