Aion breaks records before release

More than 170,000 members of the Korean gaming public have signed up to the beta for NCsoft’s forthcoming Aion: The Tower of Eternity.

The open beta only became available last Tuesday (November 11th) and has already become the most popular beta event in Korean history.

NCsoft officials revealed that within two minutes of the beta release over 11,000 players were logged into the game. That number rose to 40,000 within an hour. The publisher had to increase the number of servers for the beta to cope with the unexpectedly high demand

David Reid, president of publishing for NCsoft West in Seattle enthiused: The response we’re seeing in Korea is incredibly exciting. Our Aion community in North America and Europe is also rapidly growing. We’ve got aggressive plans for the western launch in 2009”.