Jeffrey Steefel has a great deal of faith in Turbine's Online, the executive producer telling site Eurogamer.net that he believes his creation is most likely to follow into the mass market.

WoW, and of course Lord of the Rings Online, is under increasing from new releases - already proving popular, while Online will see also attack the genre in force.

"There's another level of success, which is reaching a certain mass-market critical mass, which to be totally fair, only has achieved completely so far," Steefel explains.

"We think that we are the game that has the most likelihood of being the second to do that, but we're not there yet."

Turbine won't say how many players the game has, although they assure it is profitable. Funcom, meanwhile, claim in excess of 400,000 Conan players.

By Luke Guttridge