Blizzard's CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime has admitted that Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has indeed made a dent on the population of World of Warcraft. However, it's not as big as some would have expected.

Morhaime said that " Age of Conan released with some initial success. We did see some of our players leave, [but] about 40% of those players have returned to World of Warcraft." He added that in spite of this, WoW still has an advantage over anything in the market as being "a product that has been continually enhanced, expanded and refined for almost four years now."

We can't argue with Morhaime's reasoning: World of Warcraft does have a good four years of live testing and development over both Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, or any of the big name MMORPGs and it shows.

To even stress this point further, it was revealed that the latest expansion for the game, Wrath of the Lich King, will be coming out between October and December. So the battle rages on with World of Warcraft fighting to retain its dominance in the MMORPG market.

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