"It's all about the balance," Gaute Godager says to me as he pulls the curtain closed on a nondescript conference room.

I've come to Oslo, Norway, to visit Funcom, the Scandinavian game developer perhaps best known for their MMO Anarchy Online. Anarchy Online, of course, has become famous as the game with arguably the worst launch and one of the more remarkable turnarounds in MMO history. In fact, the game remains successful and even profitable today in the face of modern competitors like World of Warcraft because the company was willing to experiment by making the game free and supporting it with in-game advertising.

According to Godager, the development team took a lot of lessons from Anarchy Online while they were developing Age of Conan. "Having a successful MMO as been an enormous advantage for us," Godager said. "It's a pretty eye-opening experience when what you think you know about how players play MMOs runs into actual data taken from a running game." In fact, one of the biggest lessons that the team learned is that what some players say they want, isn't always what everyone really needs.