Originally posted by finaticd

Originally posted by pupurun

... and for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit.  MMOs break-even and then make a profit based on subscribers so yeah if a few hundred thousand players stayed subscribed then it may have broke even.

No mmo EVER sold more than 5.000.000 at launch....And AOC had over 600.000 subs for at least 6 months...

this game shoulda been huge but instead dressed to fail from the start. not even talking about the missing features like drunken brawling.. thats why i went for drinkin cape ffs.

first they promised all kinds of interesting ideas, like gear wont matter that much. crafted gear will be best . cool combo system awesome dungeons. apropably more that ive forgotten. now how did those work ? they had to start spending resources to fix this desing ! whos going to spend time in tedious dungeon for reward in terms sparkling poop it does look nice butdoenst do much good. now gear matters more than it did, crafted gear truly was the best not any more. i played one of those polearm guardians before first gem nerf, good time indeed sorry for the rest of you ;) combo system is cool but why mages got away from it ? they had to spend so much time and resources changin these things so obviously its going to affect how the game evolves.

then the skills and talents.. oh man. so many useles, bugged, hard to use.. you know those gazillion coupel second buffs and abilities you supose to be using at right time, all the time? with no global cooldown people with macro keyboard have big advantage. and then in first month or so you doing almost complete overhauls on class talents, somethings amiss. again, time well spent.

too much rant i agree so in the end i see how this game should been in development and testing for another year. they would have not lose much id go so far saying it could have been huge succes. graphics/engine are still number 1 in MMO world thats the only thing they did right who knows maybe we would have gotten more open world style.

wasnt there at launch of AO but i hear similar things how messed up that was.

conclusion they rush theyr MMO`s now lets see if third time is the charm and prove me wrong.

Remember that they fired a lot of staff, then opened a new studio in Canada. Such things have its toll on the timeline of a video game.

It was very enjoyable when I played during RotGS' release. Though they did a lot of faux-pas with their handling of the PVP scene.

Originally posted by pupurun

Originally posted by finaticd

Originally posted by pupurun

... and for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit.  MMOs break-even and then make a profit based on subscribers so yeah if a few hundred thousand players stayed subscribed then it may have broke even.

No mmo EVER sold more than 5.000.000 at launch....And AOC had over 600.000 subs for at least 6 months...

AoC Never, ever sustained 600,000 at 6-months pos-launch.   AoC sold 700k copies or more; it was a great jump-start from teh hype.  I wouldnt be so proud, though.  Selling 700,000 or so copies, and within 4-months, tanking to 400,000 subscribers, then at the 6-month point, we'd be generous to say they had 200,000 sustained subscribers.

Originally posted by cyphers

 

That doesn't make any sense at all, a good number of the AAA titles are 50 to 60 million dollars in development and despite them not selling 1 million+ boxes they've still been doing great financially. Heck, Rift is stated to have a 50-100 million dollar budget and they're on the record saying that a few 100k subs they'd already be satisfied with, while in your flawed calculations that'd mean they would already have huge financial losses. In your calculations all the AAA titles except World of Warcraft would be huge financial losses.

Still on your crusade, eh, even after what, 2 years now? Heh, funny. Ah well, everybody needs a hobby, I guess.

It is reality though, Funcom sold about a million boxes total and 900,000 of those where the first week. It would have been better if they direct downloaded the release but they didn't so there was no huge lumpsome payments, they made 8 million profit that following http://www.funcom.com/funcom/frontend/files/CONTENT/Funcom_Q308_report_2912.pdfquarter but it wasn't some crazy figure that would cover the four straight years of heavy losses from developing AoC and in future quarters the revenues from subscriptions didn't cover quarterly operating or development of TSW and the expansion so they took losses while the population and revenue from AoC kept declining.  The profits from the expansion made the last two quarters profitable but it doesn't cover the losses from the last two and a half years. Not sure what you are implying but I doubt Funcom would be making up numbers for the financial reports as that is illegal. 

I can't imagine anyone saying 100,000 subs is good as it won't break-even and won't allow for future development. EQ1 had about 100,000 subs and had much less of a budget and charged the same subscription price as MMOs do today.  Warhammer got prety much all development pulled after going below 100,000 subs and even though warhammer has done nothing it has a similar population to AoC.

  300,000 steady subs plus racking out expansions would be fine as that worked well for LOTRO even before going FTP.  Aion has about 1,000,000 subs and does pretty well and got an expansion out pretty quick. 

Eh, dude, I don't know what you're replying upon, seems to me you're purposely avoiding the point. The point being that you said that 'for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit', a calculation that is so offbase and wrong that it becomes ridiculous, as everyone else would agree to.

Originally posted by finaticd

Originally posted by cyphers

 

That doesn't make any sense at all, a good number of the AAA titles are 50 to 60 million dollars in development and despite them not selling 1 million+ boxes they've still been doing great financially. Heck, Rift is stated to have a 50-100 million dollar budget and they're on the record saying that a few 100k subs they'd already be satisfied with, while in your flawed calculations that'd mean they would already have huge financial losses. In your calculations all the AAA titles except World of Warcraft would be huge financial losses.

Still on your crusade, eh, even after what, 2 years now? Heh, funny. Ah well, everybody needs a hobby, I guess.

It is reality though, Funcom sold about a million boxes total and 900,000 of those where the first week. It would have been better if they direct downloaded the release but they didn't so there was no huge lumpsome payments, they made 8 million profit that following http://www.funcom.com/funcom/frontend/files/CONTENT/Funcom_Q308_report_2912.pdfquarter but it wasn't some crazy figure that would cover the four straight years of heavy losses from developing AoC and in future quarters the revenues from subscriptions didn't cover quarterly operating or development of TSW and the expansion so they took losses while the population and revenue from AoC kept declining.  The profits from the expansion made the last two quarters profitable but it doesn't cover the losses from the last two and a half years. Not sure what you are implying but I doubt Funcom would be making up numbers for the financial reports as that is illegal. 

I can't imagine anyone saying 100,000 subs is good as it won't break-even and won't allow for future development. EQ1 had about 100,000 subs and had much less of a budget and charged the same subscription price as MMOs do today.  Warhammer got prety much all development pulled after going below 100,000 subs and even though warhammer has done nothing it has a similar population to AoC.

  300,000 steady subs plus racking out expansions would be fine as that worked well for LOTRO even before going FTP.  Aion has about 1,000,000 subs and does pretty well and got an expansion out pretty quick. 

 

 Lotro oonly had 500k in box sales,  After mom rolled out they only had 150k subs playing, and lower and that is why it went free to play.  They might have,  possibly 300k playing now if that.   All that data was comming from a web site that counted total log in and gave a running total,  and that was log ins for main and alt toons.

Well, what I think is interesting about MMO's, and clearly AoC in particular, is at launch, these games garner a lot of attention.  I mean, on say of release, we see the servers packed full to almost always for a high profile game like AoC was over 1 mil.  So, what we can deduce from this is that people are wanting a new game to play.  People want something else other than WoW.  They want to try another game like AoC... or TOR.... or whatever the new kid on the block is.  The interest is there in roves.

Where they fail is they just continue to release shoddy products.  AoC was a disaster of a game at launch.  It was passable and pretty damn good up until you got out of the startign area, which for most people took at most a week.  The hardcore folk did it in a day.

I mean, take Champions Online - the people were there waiting for a great game.  I don't really know th enumbers, but I imagine the initial subscription base was pretty high.  But everyone left - why?  Because the game was incredibly broken, buggy, and just generally unfun.

So, now we are starting to see the rise of the f2p-item mall MMO's, where the quality of the game isn't even talked about.  In games like this, they market the business of the game - they talk to no end about how it's free to play, and you pay only what you want to pay.  They literally speak nothing of the game itself, and why it's even worth the trouble.

Guys like Jack Emmerit (whatever his name is) who run CO will defend their position of the f2p model to the death.  "WoW has pretty much cornered the p2p market, and there really is no point in trying to inch into that."  He actually said this (I'm paraphrasing, not quoting.)  He's such an idiot - the people were there to play his game, and all he had to do was release a product that wasn't buggy and didn't have content gaps.  He is blaming something else for his mistakes.

I really hope this next wave of MMO's learns from this.  I can't be the only person who sees it.  I cant be the only person who notices the fact that 1,000,000 people in-game on day one isn't some little detail that can be ignored.  There are way too many games on the horizaon that look really great, and it would be a shame if all of them fell into this same stupid trap.  Just don't release a game when there are obvious problems in it.

Content gaps are a little less of a problem than bugs, but you'd better have that shipped up by the three month mark.  Above all else - the game should have 90% of all bug related issues, resolved before release - period.

A subscription game doesn't really need to cover 100% of its development cost with box sales, as subscriptions are helping to make up for it once the game as launched.

In the case of Funcom, it got in the red with Age of Conan. They reported 33 millions in losses for 2008, 9.6 millions in Q32009, and were kept in the red for the longest time. They still opened their new studio in Montréal in Q42009, but they reduced their workforce by 20% in the same time.

Originally posted by cyphers

Eh, dude, I don't know what you're replying upon, seems to me you're purposely avoiding the point. The point being that you said that 'for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit', a calculation that is so offbase and wrong that it becomes ridiculous, as everyone else would agree to.

 

To make a profit or break even it is simple math and correct, but I did some research and it is likely closer to 3 million to break-even if you develop and publish your own game that costs 60 m to develop (most games are no where near 60m and most of the time the publisher takes half of the developer's cut)...Before AoC went to bargin bin it was selling for $50 dollars like most games,  Xbox and PS3 games would sell for $50 but MS and Sony take $10 per box to make up for losing money on selling consoles and add it to retail price. 

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs

50 dollars point of sale price for a video game box.

"Wholesalers typically pay around $30 per game and with the costs of getting the goods to the wholesalers, any co-op advertising or marketing, and return of good contingencies being roughly $14 per game, the publisher is going to typically get $16 for every unit sold."

http://www.funcom.com/wsp/funcom/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&func_id=1141&table=CONTENT

"SCi/Eidos is to publish the boxed product of ‘Age of Conan’ while Funcom retains digital distribution rights."

Remember AoC launched as retail only and remained that way for a long time so Eidos probably did pretty well and Funcom was expecting to have a ton of subscription revenue which didn't happen after the exodus. However, publishing is very risky and most lose money. So the $16 per box is split between the developer and publisher.

-----------------------

So if a developer self publishes, (Funcom got a publisher for release) and makes 100% of the publisher cut that is $16 per game and if they spent 60,000,000 developing a game, which is a figure that would exclude advertising but lets imagine all costs are 60,000,000 and development was $50,000,000

60,000,000/ $16 = 3,750,000 box sales to break even meaning no profit at all, which is bad.

---------

Now a few points: 

Most games are no where near 60m development costs, only AAA games that people know will do well or MMOs.

Companies can lose money or break even on an original title and make money by selling cheap map packs or a cheap expansion (that is why many sequals are bad as they spend a lot to introduce a game to market and then spend a fraction to cash in).

MMOs like age of conan have huge operating costs to keep servers running and keep customer support like GMs around that most games don't and they need to keep developing, like post release patches but they also have subscriptions. 

Map packs and subscriptions and digital downloads raise the revenue per customer by a lot, Funcom digitaly released the expansion and there is no figure on its development costs but it was 2 years time and 30 million out of 60 million was for upgrading the game engine so maybe 15m costs and in fantasy land they would get the full 30 per download, ignoring conan license and bandwith costs, but remember they asked for $3 dollars to cover the trial download price.

15,000,000 investment / $30 price = 500,000 sales to break even in fantasy land where you get  100% of price.

In fantasy land let's say they sold 100,000 expansions at $30

3,000,000 income and now they need subscription revenue from those 100,000 players, it didn't happen but imagine if the population was 100% stable after launch and didn't go down and people all pay the max 1 month reoccuring sub of 15 USD.

15,000,000 development costs - 3,000,000 income from 100,000 sales = 12m

12m / ($15 per month * 100,000 players) = 8 months

So they could break even in 8 months from a 15m expansion if opperating costs where zero after release which they are not and seem closer to 1m a month and if AoC does zero development and loses 100% of staff.  But those are as optomistic and positive as numbers can get and show why 100,000 is not enough for a 60m game, and earlier I showed why 1 million unit sales is not enough for a 60m game as companies never get 100% of sales.

This discussion is getting tiresome and sidetracking, and considering former debates you threw offtrack to vent your rants that often had nothing to do with the OP, maybe it's done by purpose. So I'm going to repeat it once again, slowly step by step, and then I leave it at that. If this time we still talk on two different tracks, then no further posts about the subject will make it any better. I for one don't feel inclined to move a thread further into derailment for people to go off on their personal rants and campaigns.

As said before, this is what it  was really about, your former comment:

for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit'

Now, taking it in slow steps:

- you are referring here to MMO games in general, not AoC specifically, but any MMO using that kind of budget

- basically you're saying that any such game need to sell 5 million on multiple platforms and sell map packs to do better than just break even

- I and others said that that statement was ludicrous, and flawed.

- There have been more MMO games that had a budget of 50+ million.

- None of these big budget AAA titles except WoW sold 5 milliion (or your 2nd figure 3.75 million) copies, and certainly not on multiple platforms.

- The Trion developers of Rift, that has a 50-100 million dollar budget mentioned that they would be profitable with a few 100k subs, they're certainly not aiming at selling 3.5 million+ copies.

- SWTOR developer Bioware, that uses a bigger budget than 60 million, is stated to need only 1 million subs and less to break even. None of these MMO companies, of current and upcoming ones, ever aimed at selling 3.75-5 million copies to do better than merely covering the costs.

- according to your statement, every single MMO company of a big budget AAA title would be liars when they said that they were profitable in the past, since according to your calculations every single one of them was suffering huge losses, since none of those big budget AAA MMO's except WoW reached that goal of 5 million copies.

- Heck, the companies of  upcoming MMO's with larger budgets than 60 million already stated that they need less to surpass break even point.

That's what I mentioned before in shorter posts. If you still want to maintain that statement of 50-60+ million budget MMO's needing to sell 5 million copies despite the evidence available in the MMO market, well, go ahead. I say that statement is ridiculous because of the reasons mentioned above. But I can't prevent people believing in the impossible, so feel free to do so.

Well here is a couple of thoughts. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that a handful of  people are band aiding Conan while the majority is working on TSW. The other is, the average entrepreneur fails 6 times before he becomes successful. I plan to play TSW when it comes out and had a lot of fun in AOC.

Originally posted by cyphers

This discussion is getting tiresome and sidetracking, and considering former debates you threw offtrack to vent your rants that often had nothing to do with the OP, maybe it's done by purpose. So I'm going to repeat it once again, slowly step by step, and then I leave it at that. If this time we still talk on two different tracks, then no further posts about the subject will make it any better. I for one don't feel inclined to move a thread further into derailment for people to go off on their personal rants and campaigns.

 

As said before, this is what it  was really about, your former comment:

for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit'

 

Now, taking it in slow steps:

- you are referring here to MMO games in general, not AoC specifically, but any MMO using that kind of budget

- basically you're saying that any such game need to sell 5 million on multiple platforms and sell map packs to do better than just break even

- I and others said that that statement was ludicrous, and flawed.

- There have been more MMO games that had a budget of 50+ million.

- None of these big budget AAA titles except WoW sold 5 milliion (or your 2nd figure 3.75 million) copies, and certainly not on multiple platforms.

- The Trion developers of Rift, that has a 50-100 million dollar budget mentioned that they would be profitable with a few 100k subs, they're certainly not aiming at selling 3.5 million+ copies.

- SWTOR developer Bioware, that uses a bigger budget than 60 million, is stated to need only 1 million subs and less to break even. None of these MMO companies, of current and upcoming ones, ever aimed at selling 3.75-5 million copies to do better than merely covering the costs.

- according to your statement, every single MMO company of a big budget AAA title would be liars when they said that they were profitable in the past, since according to your calculations every single one of them was suffering huge losses, since none of those big budget AAA MMO's except WoW reached that goal of 5 million copies.

- Heck, the companies of  upcoming MMO's with larger budgets than 60 million already stated that they need less to surpass break even point.

 

That's what I mentioned before in shorter posts. If you still want to maintain that statement of 50-60+ million budget MMO's needing to sell 5 million copies despite the evidence available in the MMO market, well, go ahead. I say that statement is ridiculous because of the reasons mentioned above. But I can't prevent people believing in the impossible, so feel free to do so.

I just brought up regular games to disprove that AoC made a ton of money on box sales which people mention over and over as fact when the opposite is true. Like how the OP assumtion that AoC made money by selling a lot when it reported heavy losses for the last two years and the four years before that so 6 total years even though it sold a million copies.

We know AoC didn't have enough sales and or subs to make any money, as they reported 6 years of heavy losses to the stockholders which own the company and that is bad news. It would be like telling a hypothetical boss instead of making 50 widgets, I broke 80 widgets. So as a fan you likely thought AoC retained about 100,000 subs for over two years and that was just enough money to declare 30m in losses and for the CFO to resign after year 1 so Rift shouldn't do what they did.

Yeah MMOs charge subs and how many you need to break-even is variable, with a 60,000,000 budget though, 100,000 subs will never do it.  You can calcualate it by using this easy formula and remember monthly operating costs and adjust      for inflation with the time-value-of money. 

Most MMOs don't do well, the number for an MMO is probablyaround 70,000 - 100,000 subs per 10million spent to break-even AND continue reasonable development.  So WoW, Aion, LOTRO, Runescape, EQ1, Eve, Guildwars is FTP but it had 5m sales and a much lower budget http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/15886-Guild_Wars_sales_reach_five_million maplestory and all those other games seem to be brought up by Funcom a lot so they likely do well too. At the end of the day most games lose money so MMOs are no exception, it is an investment risk. The diffrence is most games you can play and are done in a week but with MMOs you play a lot to build your toon and want the company to fix and make stuff which they can't if it doesn't make money. Heck a lot of games I played the developers went out of business afterwards, like titan quest's immortal throne.

Inconclusion,  AoC didn't have a combination of high enough sales and did not keep enough subscribers to make back the money it spent in development or after release so it lost money and that is why development is slow.   Warhammer, had a similar budget and 1m sales and always had similar population numbers and decided to do pretty much zero post release development do to development being a waste of money and a loss.

EDIT: where is this 100,000 subscribers for a 1m game quote? cause I'm pretty sure the board of directors would fire him the next day after a simple break-even calculation as that would never break even ever, unless they decide to sell all end game weapons and armor and levels for $50 a pop.

REMINDER OF ORIGINAL POST

"Funcom, the least progressive&active and productive company of an AAA game in the world.Why?"

People please stay on subject! I want your opinions about what i ask. Why did Funcom let go of Aoc?

Originally posted by Loke666

The game still miss content (or did when I got back after the expansion launch and a month forward), forcing players to grind a number of levels in villas.

God...the villas...I get sick just thinking of it.

I leveled my Guard to 80. I was lucky to be in a cool guild. When I hit 80, they told me what kind of stuff I needed to farm so I could get epics to start raiding. I came to AoC to pvp and found out it was a desolate uber-realistic version of WoW with powerful but boring caster class combat and somewhat interesting but usually gimped melee classes. Where was the pvp?

If I want to play a gear based game, why not just play WoW? It's the best of that type.

My whole AoC debacle actually helped me to find out about Darkfall, so I'm glad about that. For PvP,  it's the best thing going for me (in spite of whatever flaws that game has balanced against other games).

AoC seemed to advertise to PvPers in the beginning but just couldn't carry it off. They resorted to trying to copy WoW and it hasn't worked (in terms of having a robust population on the existing servers).

Originally posted by xBludx

Originally posted by Loke666

The game still miss content (or did when I got back after the expansion launch and a month forward), forcing players to grind a number of levels in villas.

God...the villas...I get sick just thinking of it.

I leveled my Guard to 80. I was lucky to be in a cool guild. When I hit 80, they told me what kind of stuff I needed to farm so I could get epics to start raiding. I came to AoC to pvp and found out it was a desolate uber-realistic version of WoW with powerful but boring caster class combat and somewhat interesting but usually gimped melee classes. Where was the pvp?

If I want to play a gear based game, why not just play WoW? It's the best of that type.

My whole AoC debacle actually helped me to find out about Darkfall, so I'm glad about that. For PvP,  it's the best thing going for me (in spite of whatever flaws that game has balanced against other games).

AoC seemed to advertise to PvPers in the beginning but just couldn't carry it off. They resorted to trying to copy WoW and it hasn't worked (in terms of having a robust population on the existing servers).

 I too spent tons of time in the villa's omg is all I can say, might as well log off for a month then log in and level up that way. Sad to say but aoc is lacking a lot of stuff.  You really need a good guild, however most of what I saw my last resub was just a bunch of yelling screaming cussing childred who had no idea of how to treat each other.  All I can say is the comunity in aoc is a lot worse than my last experiance in wow.

Originally posted by Loke666

Phew, there are worse companies than that. Cryptics handling of CO and STO makes Funcom look competent and SOEs treatment of Vanguard isn't much better, it took them 2 years to fix the bugs.

But I agree that FC work really slow on AoC and lost a lot of players on it. The game still miss content (or did when I got back after the expansion launch and a month forward), forcing players to grind a number of levels in villas.

It will probably be until 2012 until the next expansion will launch and if they are smart they can finally fill up those missing zones then, like 30-55 and 65-75. They are just slower than postal service with adding more content. I can live with bugs but not with too much missing content.

But compared to STO is AoC a masterpiece in most aspects. Vanguard is finally fixed up but since they lost almost every player the team is so cut that it split lead designer with EQ2 and updating it goes even slower than for AoC.

Gotta agree, especially with the Cryptic stuff.  And yeah, AoC to this day still has some annoying bugs that were there from launch.  I can't play for more than 10 minutes without having my sword swinging further and further away from my hand.

They've never been terribly fast at producing new content, and now they're getting slower.  It seems like alot of the stuff that's their main focus in the patch notes, is page 5 stuff in other games.  Again, with the exception of Cryptic. 

So new pvp maps, new pve raids and engine improvements are page 5 in other games? What are you talking about? Maybe the class revamp? LOL ...

Finaticd always comes up when AoC is about to become more popular again. Every time. And he is still not banned. If heis not a lunatic and/or a rival company employed writter than I don't know what is really.

Throwing doom and gloom after this thread was posted on AoC forums: http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=162219 . Have to admit, after such positive feedback and on a forum that was never known for positive posters, I am indeed tempted to try the game out again. They might be a bit slow but oh boy what treats they are serving to their customers for christmas and more to come!

Another thing to finaticd's army. You guys say that it is not a big deal that AoC is getting new engine update because it is being developed for TSW. I would suspect that porting an engine is not a work done by 2 developers, wouldn't you?

Originally posted by nihce

Another thing to finaticd's army. You guys say that it is not a big deal that AoC is getting new engine update because it is being developed for TSW. I would suspect that porting an engine is not a work done by 2 developers, wouldn't you?

Of course not. The new engine was the creation of the former AOC dev staff which is now TSW staff. And they are NOT 2.

But the number of dev staff dedicated 100%  at AOC only could be close to 2.....As a resutl , all changes , good or bad are made in an unacceptable slow and slugish manner which results to people quiting. Thats what i can never understand, thus the creation of the post....This game could be the greatest by far.Now they seem to know what they are doing but for an unexplained reason they  are still slow and perhaps most hardcore players can wait..but the game needs more people in order not to die out  or become FTP.

They stopped caring about AOC a long time ago and they are banking on The Secret World pulling them out of the doldrums.  Fair enough if it's as different as they say then perhaps it might, but when you look at WoW and Cataclysm (3 million copies sold in 24 hours) how different do you need to be?   Bottom line most people that have played AOC see it's potential - but for some strange reason the developers don't.  I think the people that saw potential no longer work at Funcom and haven't worked at Funcom for some time.  The GD is a muppet with no development experience, a journalist by trade.  There I think to eloquently deflect the criticism more than do anything.  Letter from the Game Director sounds nice, means nothing, and is always non-committal.