Developer Qplaze has announced that its mobile MMO game Age of Heroes Online has signed up more than 20,000 players.

The company made the game available through Russian and Ukrainian mobile operators at the start of January, and has seen the number of registered users double, and actual online players nearly triple as a result.

The game, which is published by Nomoc, will be rolling out to other countries next, according to Qplaze president Andrey Baranovskiy.

"In the nearest future citizens of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia and also Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kirghizia will get an access to the game - and will be able to pay the subscriber fee and the paid services in game," he says.

"At the moment our immediate task is the launch of the second server - the English-speaking one, for European citizens and the Baltic states that will be able to handle much higher number of users."

Currently, players in Russia and the Ukraine get a three week free trial, before signing up for a subscription. The game also uses more than 30 kinds of micropayments to make it easier and speed up character development.

Qplaze has continued to add new content to the game every week, including quests, locations and portals - with plans to introduce a new race and raise the game's level cap in the next few months.

Nomoc president Evgeniy Korobka says the game's pricing model is also helping to turn consumers who usually pirate mobile games into paying customers.

"Our players are completely unaccustomed with paying in on-line games - our people most often play on pirate servers in cracked versions even of highly popular games," he says.

"Nevertheless, the introduction of commercial services in Age of Heroes Online showed our players are ready to pay for a high-quality product."