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415,000 Age of Conan Users Drive Funcom's $13 Million Q2
by Leigh Alexander
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August 15, 2008
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Norway-based Funcom's Age of Conan has sold, both digitally and at retail, over 800,000 copies, the company says, and now has 415,000 customers.
The successful launch, Funcom says, helped propel it to second quarter revenues of $13 million, exceeding its own estimations by $1 million primarily thanks to higher box sales than Funcom expected, while losses totaled about $5.7 million, largely in AoC launch costs.
Funcom expects revenues of $16 to $20 million in the third quarter, primarily from AoC subscription dollars, while the company says it'll aim to maximize the length of current user engagement while earning new subscribers.
The company says it's been issuing an average of one patch per week, and will continue to "commit enhancement and corrections" to AoC based on player feedback, as part of its retention strategy, with a focus on the "high end" parts of the game, along with items and bug fixes.
Funcom also says that the average playtime per player is lower than it expected, and suggests this might be due to the fact that the average player, at age 29, is older and likely has less time for long sessions, and that at this time during the year many are on summer vacation trips.
The company plans to enter the Russian and Polish markets with new localizations, and says it's also negotiating in the Asian markets to launch there in the second half of 2009. Finally, the company is "in the early development phase" of the Xbox 360 version of Age of Conan.
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It's quite the subjective bend to assume their playerbase is more 'mature' and therefore have less time to dedicate. No Halo would ever boast how little time players spend playing their game. How fun does the game seem to the outsider now, who is deciding to buy the game?
I respect a lot of the individuals at Funcom and who worked on AoC, and I am, like anyone else, glad to see it standing up to WoW and perhaps spurring some competition in the MMO market, but as a whole the game is quite broken.
I left the game not only because my female character was broken (finding this out later only made everything clearer) but because the game quickly devolved, as if it were a politician who proposed something new but was really just the same as every other politician.
I'm ranting now, but it would be nice for news updates such as this one to be delivered without the slight tinge of PR speak, which plays up the apparent strengths and downplays the elephant-in-the-room problems that are a reality.
loosing half of the subscriber base after the first few month wouldnt lead to much optimism in my book.
On top of that Funcom routinely lies to its customers. I played AoC for a few days until I figured out they are basically a rip-off company. They distributed preorders cards with the expressly written promise that this would grant you early access to the game. Unfortunately the oversold these cards and thousands of people were left out in the cold. Then instead of admitting their mistake and trying to make some sort of amends they tried to claim that early access to the game was first come fist serve basis even though this was stated nowhere on the preorder cards.
In my view it seems they want to sell as many boxes as possible before players figure out the sorry state of the game and quit. Why else are they spending time and money at DragonCon when they should be fixing their game? As is stands their stock has fallen though the floor.