Originally posted by Derpybird

Originally posted by bcbully

I too think it's bad. TSW had about 50 million to TSW happen. In all honesty it looks like they pored all of it into the game. 

 It's a shame this day and age a game like Swtor can sell 2.4million and still have 500K+ subs. Not only did swtor revolutionize story delivery, they revolutionized hype. They put money into the industry 300-500 million dollars.  There are several lessons to be learned in this.

 That being said what if TSW did gain 100k or even 50k subs from now till the end of the 3rd qt.?

  

How likely would you say that is with the immanent release of GW2 then MoP one month later?

Most important was the paragrah above the last sentence.

 

No game has in the last 5 or 6 years. Improbable, but out of those games that have launch in the last 5 or 6 years TSW in my opinion is the best by a wide margin. 

 

I think there is still plenty of story to be told with this one.

 

edit - maybe the best since WoW. Here is a list of mmos released since 2004.

[mod edit - please do NOT break the forums with your posts ;)]

Originally posted by Derpybird

Originally posted by bcbully

I too think it's bad. TSW had about 50 million to TSW happen. In all honesty it looks like they pored all of it into the game. 

 It's a shame this day and age a game like Swtor can sell 2.4million and still have 500K+ subs. Not only did swtor revolutionize story delivery, they revolutionized hype. They put money into the industry 300-500 million dollars.  There are several lessons to be learned in this.

 That being said what if TSW did gain 100k or even 50k subs from now till the end of the 3rd qt.?

  

How likely would you say that is with the immanent release of GW2 then MoP one month later?

I think they have cornered themselves with this one. Unless both GW2 and MoP(and PS2) are huge bust and then they invest tons of money into marketing and promotions this is unlikely to grow.

 

 

Originally posted by bcbully

Originally posted by Derpybird

Originally posted by bcbully

I too think it's bad. TSW had about 50 million to TSW happen. In all honesty it looks like they pored all of it into the game. 

 It's a shame this day and age a game like Swtor can sell 2.4million and still have 500K+ subs. Not only did swtor revolutionize story delivery, they revolutionized hype. They put money into the industry 300-500 million dollars.  There are several lessons to be learned in this.

 That being said what if TSW did gain 100k or even 50k subs from now till the end of the 3rd qt.?

  

How likely would you say that is with the immanent release of GW2 then MoP one month later?

Most important was the paragrah above the last sentence.

 

No game has in the last 5 or 6 years. Improbable, but out of those games that have launch in the last 5 or 6 years TSW in my opinion is the best by a wide margin. 

 

I think there is still plenty of story to be told with this one.

 

 

Story is all TSW has. As a game TSW has very little depth and that's the problem here. TSW is a one trick pony and when you tire of the trick or aren't impressed by the trick it's over. By depth I mean there basically is only one thing to do and that is quest. Crafting is an after thought as is PvP. The world isn't big enough to truly go exploring. 

Funcom wanted to make sure that they wouldn't run into the same problem as with AoC. That they forgot that an MMO entails more than just questing and running instances.

Basically they were screwed from the start after SWTOR failed with the same setup. Even if you rate TSW higher, which is pure opinion. Most gamers that tried SWTOR, which is a lot, will be wary of an another story driven MMO. Story driven MMOs don't have longevity simply because the story is non repeatable and if you add alt unfriendly gameplay to that it becomes even worse. So you need strong side objectives in game to keep players doing things and like I said TSW doesn't have those.

So Funcom being in the position they are in doesn't suprise me. Neither do the lay offs they will be doing in the next month or so to cut cost.

To be honest Funcom has floundered long past the time it should have just faded away quietly, which was basically right after the Anarchy Online debacle. They were lucky they have been able to hold on as long as they have. Or at least they could have stuck with the only thing they were good at, providing canned single player experiences ala Longest Journey.

I don't know how anyone in their right mind could have felt that a slightly interractive story with a subscription and a cash shop could possibly have any real longevity. Who pays a monthly fee and microtransactions to read a book? A book that might add a page or two every couple months? ...So it doesn't surprise me to see TSW not doing well, and the upcoming mmo releases that provide much more value in comparison really do not help them.

 

Ignoring everything about quality/taste and talking only about the market, TSW would, sadly,  go to F2P in the coming months. It isn´t about how good a game is, but more about how big is the title in the market. And as how we see it today, Guild Wars 2 and WoW will just dominate the market in the next 3-6 months which may take the attention from TSW and as the game is still growing, this may effect it pretty badly and may destory it.

 

The game's great at what it does. Based on the reviews of other games, it should have easily scored an 8/10. Reviews weren't negative though, just mainly neutral. But obviously not good enough.

I agree that GW2 and Panda hype totally silenced the release of this game. They should have dumped more into advertising, as most people I know and have talked to have never even heard of this game - and many of these people are active MMROPG players.

I think the lack of advertising really blew it for them... and the next few months will be all about GW2 and Pandas. There's probably no way to really recover from that.

 

 

The irony is that they saw how Conan failed due to spending too much money on advertising, and not enough on content development - so they reversed the situation - spent all their resources on content development, at the expense of advertising. The results: Instead of having 1,000,000 furious (but paying) customers, they have 100,000 happy customers.

Originally posted by bcbully

Originally posted by Kuppa

Originally posted by bcbully

Originally posted by Kuppa

Interesting read. Their stocks fall sharply after the release of TSW, they attribute it to the metacritic scores. The one thing that might make sense of that is the what they mention next. Because its a new IP it needs to take off well.

Whats more interesting is this part: "Funcom has on several occasions presented two financial scenarios for the first 12 months following launch of the game; please refer to page 17 in the 1Q 2012 presentation *). Funcom does not consider it likely that either of them will be met. "

 

If you look at those two scenarios they basically go like this:

Target Scenario

• Client sales 30% higher than AoC
• Majority of digital client sales
• Subs/client price as AoC
• In-game store sales/uptic amounting to 35% of subs. revenue
• Healty retention; 490,000 average subs

Conan-like scenario

• 1,050,000 client sales first year
• Poor retention (a bit better than AoC) 280,00 average subs
• Other assumptions as above

 

When we look at this we can deduce the game sold less than 1M clients and it has less than 280k subs. And going by this statement: " but based on the available early data, one scenario is that sales for the first 12 months following launch will be less than half of what was presented in the "Conan-like" scenario. "

They expect to sell less than 500k clients in the first 12 months.

 

Even though their sales are pretty low and their subs are below 280k projected over the first year they feel positive that if they keep the quality high enough they can mantain profitability.

"A possible scenario going forward is that the game will sell less than both of the two above mentioned scenarios the first 12 months following launch, but with high customer satisfaction, it will generate a more stable subscriber base than the game Age of Conan. Over time, this will enable Funcom to retain more customers and generate higher revenue."

 

What I did was put what you deduced in red. Then highlighted why you may be in error depending on the context of the yellow, which I attempt to frame in yellow below.

 

You deduced from projection of sales that retention was low, and that subs were less than 280k. In the orange Funcom speaks specifically to sales.  

 

From the large type in the last paragraph it looks like retention is much higher than AoC.

 

The majority of those who have played the game rate the game highly as seen on metacritic and mmorpg. There are just not enough people who have played. This looks like a marketing issue more so than a game issue.

 

 

I did not deduce their retention was low, as a matter of fact like you mention they say its good. What I do deduce and that is a plain fact if you read what they said, that they have less than 280k subs. How do you know this? because they clearly state that they do NOT expect to meet their two scenarios. One of those was having at least 280k subs. Having a low number of subs does not mean low retention.

There are two plain facts you can read from this. They do NOT expect to sell more than 500k and they do NOT expect to have 280k subs in the first 12 months.

"A possible scenario going forward is that the game will sell less than both of the two above mentioned scenarios the first 12 months following launch, but with high customer satisfaction, it will generate a more stable subscriber base than the game Age of Conan. Over time, this will enable Funcom to retain more customers and generate higher revenue."

 

All you can duduce is that the game has less than half of 1million+ subs. Your mixing projected retention with projected sales to get to your 280k number.

 

Now we are only talking about plus or minus 220k subs, but far as what you deduced there is a possible margin of error of near 50% in total numbers. 

Yo how those 750k subs treating you? 

Originally posted by bcbully

Here's my take.

 

Around the time I first stumbled upon the secret world and after getting a firm understanding of the design philosophy. I made statments like,

 

March 14th 2012 MMO-C TSW mega thread.

"No I do not want the masses flocking over there screaming quest are too hard. Screaming for all, that they wont take the time to earn. I want the game to be a secret. The casual newbie generation has WoW, SW:TOR, and soon GW2. 

The secret world does not need 10 million of the new generation of rpgrs that don't now what a D-3 is let alone character generation. Yes I wish the game would remain a secret letting those who followed the intro ARG for  years help the game develop."

 

500k sounded just about right for launch growing to about 900k over the year. As time rolled along CB started. The excitement in those forums and the felling of a tight nitt community was like nothing I've seen before. The game had delivered on it's design philosophy. Then the ads came, and more gamers got a whiff of what the game was, what I and others wanted for the game slowy changed. I felt that a game this good and this true to the core values of Role Playing Games needed to be rewarded, and I still do. That 500k grew to possiblities of a million at launch. The game is that good. That rich in detail and systems.

 

So not reaching 1 million yet? Yeah it's dissapointing. The game deserves it.  However 400-500k  at launch is inline with my initial hopes and expectations, and growing to 900k one year after launch is not out of the question. The game is too good not to grow. 

 

inb4 BC you just said you thought there would be 800k!@ I was wrong ;) I hope the above explains why.

 

That's utter wishful thinking IMO, but best of luck with that.

Sounds more like their clutching at straws really, or looking for a positive when there isn't none. I've never seen any game company start quoting Metacritic for indicators. If I was an investor I'd be quite worried as someone started using that as a source and not provide me with hard retention numbers.

 Much like SWTOR, Funcom expected TSW to do much bigger then it has so far. The irony is, most of the professionals are right about TSW, there are gapping holes in the overall package here that your enthusastic metacritic user won't see in at first. There are also issues with it beyond any critic reviews.  A cash shop and a sub did put some people off, regardless of whether they looked into what was on offer, some people just saw it as little more then a scam

I would suspect more people actually bought the game then was suggested but few are going to continue paying, investing in the cash shop, spending money.  It might be a rough few months for fans of this game.

Originally posted by Bhorzo

The game's great at what it does. Based on the reviews of other games, it should have easily scored an 8/10. Reviews weren't negative though, just mainly neutral. But obviously not good enough.

I agree that GW2 and Panda hype totally silenced the release of this game. They should have dumped more into advertising, as most people I know and have talked to have never even heard of this game - and many of these people are active MMROPG players.

I think the lack of advertising really blew it for them... and the next few months will be all about GW2 and Pandas. There's probably no way to really recover from that.

 

 

The irony is that they saw how Conan failed due to spending too much money on advertising, and not enough on content development - so they reversed the situation - spent all their resources on content development, at the expense of advertising. The results: Instead of having 1,000,000 furious (but paying) customers, they have 100,000 happy customers.

And yet those 1,000,000 furious (paying) customers netted more revenue than those 100,000 happy customers.

FC dug themselves in a hole with AoC much like how Cryptic did with there previous titles.  Many will bring up AoC and as the common label has been thrown around "Failcom."  Problem is the timing and the competition.  GW2 is soon to be released, MoP is also close to being released I think.  Between those two it might be a hard sale for TSW, FC released it at a bad time imo especially with a P2P + CS buisness model.  There is going to be a plummet in subs soon n then a rebound but likely not anywhere near the strength that it was between GW2 and the "ohhh shiney" effect wearing off.

More advertisement/hype wouldn't have made too much of a difference for em.  SWTOR had incredible hype generator, EA financial backing of advertisement, the IP of SW, and the reputation of BW all contribute to a montserous hype machine.

Originally posted by jdnyc

Originally posted by Jackdog
Well I can say with a high degree of certainty that the game did not sell 1/2 the amount of boxes trhey wanted it to sell and he retention has been pretty bad. Alexis, Quantcast, Google Trends, and yes even the accursed XFire wil show that. I was a fence sitter both before and after launch and liked a lot of the game but as a  above poster pointed out this was a bad time to launch. A Christmas launch would have been bettter in my opinion.

Actually they said their retention is good (for now.)  Google Trends not sure about that equating sales.   Xfire?  no one I know uses it.  Never heard of the other two things you mentioned.

Alexus and Quantcast are site  traffic analysis tools, they give a lot of info on how many people visit the game home site, forum traffic etc. Guess what I don't use XFire as a bckground program nor does anyone I know, but there are a lot of people that do for some unknown reason.  Myself I shut down every background program I can to maximize performance.  However if you look at any specific games XFire hours played it will tell you a lot about that particular game. For example Game A normally has 2500 hours on  Tuesdays but one Tuesday it drops to 1500 hours, and was back up to 2350 on Wednesday and on Monday it was 2475. Obviously that Tuesday they had server maintainance or server issues.

On Secret World August 9 had 2200 hours, August 02 was 2654, the thursday before that July 26 had 3035 hours. That shows a steqady downward trend. I would never try and guess boxes sold or compare Game A to Game B using XFire but to track a game and analyze wheter it is gaining players, losing players, or breaking even  it works pretty well.

Take for whatever it is worth or blow it off, just making a observation not trying to troll

 

 

Originally posted by Kuppa

If you look at those two scenarios they basically go like this:

Target Scenario

• Client sales 30% higher than AoC
• Majority of digital client sales
• Subs/client price as AoC
• In-game store sales/uptic amounting to 35% of subs. revenue
• Healty retention; 490,000 average subs

Conan-like scenario

• 1,050,000 client sales first year
• Poor retention (a bit better than AoC) 280,00 average subs
• Other assumptions as above

 

When we look at this we can deduce the game sold less than 1M clients and it has less than 280k subs. And going by this statement: " but based on the available early data, one scenario is that sales for the first 12 months following launch will be less than half of what was presented in the "Conan-like" scenario. "

They expect to sell less than 500k clients in the first 12 months.

I never understood why Funcom thought TSW would be a big draw.  AoC turned people away, it was going to be very difficult to match AoC launch numbers.  Subscription games not named WOW are dying.

The numbers do not surprise me. I plan on playing TSW but because it's Funcom I didn't purchace it on release. Since the launch went smooth I will be purchasing the game. I may not be the only one who is intrugued by the game but took a wait and see policy. As a results the initial sales numbers are not as big as expected.

I think there is one thing very clear here that P2P + CS business model is just plainly not working, many peoples just turned off because of this and think that it's a scam as I my self still on the fence to buy this game just because of this issue despite many peoples playing this game told me that the game is good. 

Added with company bad rep with AoC, negative reviews from professional reviewer and lack of advertisement not many willing to buy TWS and rather wait for incoming MMO games in a month or 2.

Sadly once MoP and GW2 launch many more peoples will be leaving TSW and sub will plummet even more, not a good news indeed.

I would say that my own interpretation is the initial projections Funcom made would have been perfectly in line had the global economy not been sliding further into a great depression, their higher than the competition subscription rate at such a time will also hurt their initial take-up of the game so I think a "double-whammy" is in effect.

I think any new title released this year (& for the next several years) is going to experience a dampened take-up unless it is a free to play title because money is just getting tighter all the time for the average player - and there's not any real recovery in the economy on the horizon yet, quite the opposite is feared.

I don't think the game requires a F2P solution, but one would definitely increase potential customers, the first thing Funcom should definitely consider is making the sub-price competitive, it is a niche game and cannot expect to grow to be huge, I like that they see a focus on quality being a realistic aim & I hope they are encouraged by the high user opinions so far rather than feel apathetic.

This thread was good for a chuckle. When I'm not playing video games, my real-life job is in finance - MBA & CFP. I read these reports all the time and it's damn funny watching others parse Funcom's communication line-by-line. My best advice, as a financial professional, is to go play a game and stop pretending to know what you are talking about. That communication is intended to cover their arses with shareholders, not be particularly helpful in any way, shape, or form. You are looking for data and information that is proprietary and which Funcom has a history of not releasing. Go...play...something...it will be a lot more productive than trying to realize any significant data from corporate financial docs.

An interesting article by a norwegian newspaper, which should be more objective than most takes by random posters.

Translated by me, so it could possible contain errors, it's not my native language.

 

-The funcom stock is dead

Carniege analysts argue that the game stock is probably finished on the Oslo stock exchange after dud.

Funcom stole the head lines on the Oslo stock exchange. The stock fell nothing less than 52.1 percent to 3.75 kroner, which sets the company's price tag at only a quarter of a billion kroner. Thus far in 2012 the stock has fallen 76 percent.

The precursor to the funcom crash is the company's new update regarding The secret world. The company is naturally disappointed over the 72 of 100 metascore.

-The game has flopped. I would have liked if the information released had been more precise, but it's in either case better than nothing. The stock has been under heavy pressure and the company has been silent, says Carnegie analyst Espen Torgersen to the financial times.

Funcom was very vague in the information update about the game, and there's no real tell.  Tofte (no idea who this is) tells the newspaper that it is likely that the subscription base will end up at less than half of 280.000 in the future.

- It's now clear that the company has gone into a restructuring phase, and that the stock on the Oslo stock exchange will be dead for the foreseeable future, as I see it. Probably finished on the Oslo stock exchange, says the analyst.

 

Edit: Source=  http://www.hegnar.no/bors/article702002.ece

 

Sounds kind of dire according to the analyst. To me though it's no surprise, I was hyped into buying Age of conan, even took a few friend with me. But in the end they delivered a unpolished single-player game with fancy combat which quickly got boring because the shallowness of it all. Shame for funcom, but it's natural selection going on here.

 

Originally posted by bcbully

Here's my take.

 

Around the time I first stumbled upon the secret world and after getting a firm understanding of the design philosophy. I made statments like,

 

March 14th 2012 MMO-C TSW mega thread.

"No I do not want the masses flocking over there screaming quest are too hard. Screaming for all, that they wont take the time to earn. I want the game to be a secret. The casual newbie generation has WoW, SW:TOR, and soon GW2. 

The secret world does not need 10 million of the new generation of rpgrs that don't now what a D-3 is let alone character generation. Yes I wish the game would remain a secret letting those who followed the intro ARG for  years help the game develop."

 

500k sounded just about right for launch growing to about 900k over the year. As time rolled along CB started. The excitement in those forums and the felling of a tight nitt community was like nothing I've seen before. The game had delivered on it's design philosophy. Then the ads came, and more gamers got a whiff of what the game was, what I and others wanted for the game slowy changed. I felt that a game this good and this true to the core values of Role Playing Games needed to be rewarded, and I still do. That 500k grew to possiblities of a million at launch. The game is that good. That rich in detail and systems.

 

So not reaching 1 million yet? Yeah it's dissapointing. The game deserves it.  However 400-500k  at launch is inline with my initial hopes and expectations, and growing to 900k one year after launch is not out of the question. The game is too good not to grow. 

 

inb4 BC you just said you thought there would be 800k!@ I was wrong ;) I hope the above explains why.

 

 

Please for your sake take you head out of the sand this game is not going to sell or retain 1 million sales or subs in its first ten years let alone the first year. Funcom stock is nosediving because they haven't achieved anywhere near their sales and retention projections, which were ludicrous in the first place, no name IP out selling one of the worlds most famous IP's (Conan) by 30% from a company that cocked that launch and game up bigtime? yeah really, so investors are dumping stock on any poor soul that wants it. As a company they have been struggling ever since AOC was released and it will continue as TSW is a typical half assed Funcom game with some great ideas and loads of crap implimentation. Any new investment is going to be nye on impossible to get because of Funcoms reputation as a bad investment. So expect these things to happen over the coming months...

 

Staff Layoffs.

Content releases slowing to a snails pace

Free2play announcement

 

TSW is a niche game without enough content  to keep players around (thats why Funcom had to calm the population with their "we will be launching new content monthly" blurb so soon after launch) and with no real profits to be had from AOC, AO and TSW coupled with little to no investment in the future of the company its going to be very tough for Funcom to ride this one out. You reap what you sow and Funcom have ploughed enough ill will in the MMO comunity for it to effect their long term survival.

 

Of course IMO

Am I the only person who doesn't use Metacritic? Ever since I started seeing them give low scores for games I absolutely love, I quit using it...

 

I just use Google. Type the name of the game and add 'review' to the end. Read the top links and read some of the player reviews. Works great everytime!

Originally posted by ApolyonBS

I'm quite surprised, the guys at Funcom are using sources like Metacritic and MMORPG.com for evaluating the success of their product. Metacritic has only 40+ critic reviews and 280+ user reviews for TSW, can this really be considered a valid source of information?

I always thought that these companies would be investing some money on market analysis and stuff like that, but reading an "Investor relations" article with those poor analysis is quite shocking...

 

Example:

"Funcom is pleased to see that gamer satisfaction is high, with user score of 8.4 out of 10 and higher on www.metacritic.com and other sites like mmorpg.com." So having 286 people voting in metacritic is something representative of their user base?

Useing Metacritic in general is a joke. That site needs to be shut down.

 

Really anytime they need to use "hey this site and this site like us!" instead of talking numbers its not good. And really how dare they use MMORPG.com. Everyone knows that everyone here on this site hates everything and we all sit around circlejerking about our favorite sanbox features.