This made me really laugh on the Age of Conan page on XFire:

My guild in AoC had 25-30 of us at the launch day none of us use Xfire. 2weeks ago our guild had to merge with another because we are down to 5 players in our guild of the origional 25-30 players. Now after the merge this guild is dying off also, went from 20-25 online at prime time 2 weeks ago to around 10 - 15 at prime time now. 

Bottom line this game is sinking like a rock.

Originally posted by Guillermo197

This made me really laugh on the Age of Conan page on XFire:

Popular Tags: aoc , conan , age , glitch , fatality , bug , adventures , ageofconan , hyborian , lol

they should add fraud

415,000 "customers" ...

Yeah ...

Right.

Originally posted by Rebn77

415,000 "customers" ...

Yeah ...

Right.

Only goes to show how wrong we all where! Stock price would suggest that the shareholders know the truth.

Well if on June 30 they had 415K and it looks like xfire numbers have dropped at least 50% from that then one might speculate that they are currently at around 200k subs.  Not a bad number but if it drops much more they will certainly have issues...

Originally posted by ethion

Well if on June 30 they had 415K and it looks like xfire numbers have dropped at least 50% from that then one might speculate that they are currently at around 200k subs.  Not a bad number but if it drops much more they will certainly have issues...

Answer this

In the 2Q they had 415k subscribers and sold 800k boxes.   They lost  6 million dollars

In the 3Q they will have less than 415k subscribers and sell significantly less than 800k boxes.

While people may say '200k subs is a good number', that is based on other companies financial situation.  Funcom is in debt,  loses money every day, and doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay operating expenses for 3 months.   200k subscribers will not be enough to make Funcom profitable just because it made other companies profitable.

Originally posted by Azrile

Originally posted by ethion

Well if on June 30 they had 415K and it looks like xfire numbers have dropped at least 50% from that then one might speculate that they are currently at around 200k subs.  Not a bad number but if it drops much more they will certainly have issues...

 

Answer this

In the 2Q they had 415k subscribers and sold 800k boxes.   They lost  6 million dollars

In the 3Q they will have less than 415k subscribers and sell significantly less than 800k boxes.

While people may say '200k subs is a good number', that is based on other companies financial situation.  Funcom is in debt,  loses money every day, and doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay operating expenses for 3 months.   200k subscribers will not be enough to make Funcom profitable just because it made other companies profitable.

I'm not sure where you get your data but from looking at their financial report they have $36M in the bank and they around 23M in debt.  So assuming they don't see continued huge losses they are not in bad shape.   However they can't continue to loose 6M a quarter and my feeling is they could be worse in the next quarter if AoC continues to tank the way the xfire numbers imply.  I'm already pretty sure they will miss their forcast for Q3 by quite a bit.  If that happens their stock will completely tank and future investment will be difficult or impossible.  Then they will be looking at seriously cutting staff to survive and our chances of seeing AoC fixed will start to dry up.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Azrile

Originally posted by ethion

Well if on June 30 they had 415K and it looks like xfire numbers have dropped at least 50% from that then one might speculate that they are currently at around 200k subs.  Not a bad number but if it drops much more they will certainly have issues...

 

Answer this

In the 2Q they had 415k subscribers and sold 800k boxes.   They lost  6 million dollars

In the 3Q they will have less than 415k subscribers and sell significantly less than 800k boxes.

While people may say '200k subs is a good number', that is based on other companies financial situation.  Funcom is in debt,  loses money every day, and doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay operating expenses for 3 months.   200k subscribers will not be enough to make Funcom profitable just because it made other companies profitable.

 

I'm not sure where you get your data but from looking at their financial report they have $36M in the bank and they around 23M in debt.  So assuming they don't see continued huge losses they are not in bad shape.   However they can't continue to loose 6M a quarter and my feeling is they could be worse in the next quarter if AoC continues to tank the way the xfire numbers imply.  I'm already pretty sure they will miss their forcast for Q3 by quite a bit.  If that happens their stock will completely tank and future investment will be difficult or impossible.  Then they will be looking at seriously cutting staff to survive and our chances of seeing AoC fixed will start to dry up.

 

It's hard to explain.....   yes, they only lost 6M (before taxes) and 8M (after taxes), but their cash flow actually decreased by 16M.    Look at the lines that say " cash assest at beginning of quarter" and  "cash assets at end of quarter".. the difference is 16M.    That said.. they have about 36M in Cash assets left.. which is basically enough to cover them for 6 months of operation. (assuming they continue to have -16M cashflow per quarter).   I think 6months is being optimistic since it's unlikely they are going to have 800k box sales or 415k subscribers in the 3Q.

Also, that does not include repayment of the debt they have.  This is significant because 23M of the debt they have is listed as short term debt, which means it is 'due' in less than 2 years.   They have another 3M in debt that is long term, which doesn't really matter.  But that 23M is significant because that is what makes a company go bankrupt.  If that loan comes due and Funcom can't pay, they will be forced into bankruptcy.

But that is an entirely different issue than what is going to happen to them in 6 months.  In six months, they simply won't have enough money to pay the normal bills.  Companies declare bankruptcy to prevent their debters (23M) from seizing assets, but even declaring bankruptcy won't keep the game alive if they can't pay for bandwidth and for their staff.

I don't think people understand just how bad of financial shape Funcom is in.  On Monday, investors will show you.

When it comes to subscriptions, I have a hard time seeing how they can do anything but drop a good deal further. WoW opened the eyes of millions to the MMO genre, and the marketing buzz around Age of Conan was pretty big. Many bought in, most were dramatically disappointed... the word of mouth referrals should be tiny as a result. Hard to make truly educated guesses about the cost of running the game vs. subscription income -- I don't imagine those items are broken out individual on financial reports =)

Seems to be dropping even faster now. Saturday the 9th they had 16442 hours and yesterday they dropped down to 13544, or  a loss of 2898 hours  which is a drop of almost 18% in a week. When WAR goes open it will hammer  (groan - bad pun ) the last nail in the coffin I am afraid. Too bad , if they had held off on release until next spring IO think they would have faired much better, but then again they have made almost  every mistake it is possible to make since release so maybe it was just a lost cause from the beginning.

Originally posted by Jackdog

Seems to be dropping even faster now. Saturday the 9th they had 16442 hours and yesterday they dropped down to 13544, or  a loss of 2898 hours  which is a drop of almost 18% in a week. When WAR goes open it will hammer  (groan - bad pun ) the last nail in the coffin I am afraid. Too bad , if they had held off on release until next spring IO think they would have faired much better, but then again they have made almost  every mistake it is possible to make since release so maybe it was just a lost cause from the beginning.

The lies made it a lost cause. People would have been alot more tolerant of them if they hadn't tried time after time in the few communications they had with us to make us think it was us or our computers that was the problem and not AoC itself. Nothing good can come from treating the community like its stupid. Evidently honesty has no direct translation into Norwegian lol.

And I thought politicians could lie, they need to hire  the PR staff at Funcom lol.