Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
I can vouch for two that wont be subbing and have quit before the free time is up, giving funcom plenty of cancel time so there wont be any "mistakes" (grin)
-2 Funcom
can you smell that?!!...............there is nothing quite like it.....................the smell of troll in the morning............i love that smell.
AGAIN who cares about subscriber numbers! we are players not stock holders. we are players and should care about game play. and the reviews prove its a incomplete but very fun game.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
its even less than that i found nowhere exact numbers how much of the money of the boxsales the gamecompany gets in pc games, but for consoles there is this:
for pc games there is no console owners fee, but i guess retail, packaging and such numbers will probably be simmilar. this shows that a developer only really gets about 50% of the costs as money to cover the developement costs. so that means they will need over a million boxes sold to recover 30 million from box sales alone.
Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).
anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.
Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).
anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.
FYI the developers get around a third of the box price back, and around half of the subscription amount is operation costs.
Based on the following factors during my time in the game (I was in-game a lot during this time as part of it coincided with a week off work so I got to see the situation at all times of day) I think we will be stretching it to say that 25% of the initial subscribers actually stayed:
The guild I was in and that of a friend, all of which had over 30 players near release were both virtually dead by the time I left , only 1-2 people logged on per day in the guild I was in. One guildmate left to join another guild and he was worried by the lack of the other players logging back in - most of them stopped just before paid subscription. The leader of my guild gave up on AoC and went back to lotro just after subscriptions kicked in.
The number of instances both in the higher level and lower level areas (I played both my 68 main and several alts from levels 5-28 a lot) has dropped dramatically a lot of zones dont even go over one instance spawned. Tortage is one of the few places that still has a few players running around (nowhere close to what was at release), this is probably the die-hard players rolling alts due to the recent class balancing.
OOC and region chat channels had hit near virtual silence the majority of the time on my server. As was noted by someone else on these forums I was actually receiving less goldspam before the end (even the goldsellers seem to be giving AoC up as a bad job).
The number of disgruntled players, goodbye posts and goodbye messages on the forums and from friends in-game.
Difficulty finding groups at all levels. The introduction of the grey-elite fixes also stopped bored players helping out their friends in lower level instances and cut down on farming to fund guild city production.
Lack of players visible when riding from the main cities through to some of the later zones. The game actually felt less crowded while riding through zones and past major mob camps.
This game had some great ideas and if Funcom had stuck to their guns and delivered the game promised it would flourish but they seem bent on destroying what they have already rather than fixing it. Im hopeful that in time it will be worth returning to, but I will be damned if I will pay them while they fix this beta title. I also dont believe that at its current rate of decline that this game will be viable at all in 6 months, never mind a future 360 release. Funcom needs a serious wake-up call.
I'd guess it was obvious to most of us in alpha/beta that AOC was nowhere ready for release. Unfortunately this seems to be the case for almost every MMORPG these days. Companies can't afford to wait, however, sometimes, so they wind up balancing their desire to earn enough revenue to keep running with their desire to present the best product available. Unfortunately the cost of premature releases can be the loss of paying subscribers. Nature of the beast. To us the products are games. To developers the products are just that--products.
AGAIN who cares about subscriber numbers! we are players not stock holders. we are players and should care about game play. and the reviews prove its a incomplete but very fun game.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
Point being. That guy has no credibility and his information is obviously extremely wrong and you can't trust a word of it.
I agree, zero credibility. More than that, his second blog/article is a complete about face. Every point he made in the first article he rebutted in teh second. Its almost as if someone put the frighteners on him--weird. Or maybe he has a new employer
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
Lets not forget that what the shops charge customers is the retail price. I have no idea how much Funcom charges retailers on a box by box basis, but if the shops carge us $50, you can be sure Fncom only gets about $20-$30 or less per box.
Whatever it is, these sorts of things are usually sold to retailers on a "sale or return" basis. Any unsold stock is returned, just like the publishing industry.
Another -1 here and if there was any longevity would have bougt a box and sub for my son too. Enjoying Vanguard as a filler for now. it's not bad at all.
Whilst the early game is fun there is not really much of a MMORPG there. Re-package it as a single player game.
AGAIN who cares about subscriber numbers! we are players not stock holders. we are players and should care about game play. and the reviews prove its a incomplete but very fun game.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
Meh. Mine was a general guesstimate. Math is still FTW since mine's still correct.
It just might not be accurate. FAQs aren't going to help me with that. And if it's more in other countires that means it costs more for Funcom to sell them to other companies, so it balances out. But I didn't take into account the Collectors edition, and oh well.
Still that's only the money they recently borrowed. I'm not even going to guess the true total expenses of making this game for 4-5 years.
--------------------------------------------- I live to fight, and fight to live.
Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
Not to take away from anything Blizzard has accomplished but there revenue from WoW is nowhere near 150,000,000 per month all the asian accounts were sold to a company for a flat rate per year which makes up 6 million of the acccounts.. Many pay only .50 per month..150,000,000 is GROSSLY exagerated
Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
Not to take away from anything Blizzard has accomplished but there revenue from WoW is nowhere near 150,000,000 per month all the asian accounts were sold to a company for a flat rate per year which makes up 6 million of the acccounts.. Many pay only .50 per month..150,000,000 is GROSSLY exagerated
In China they pay per hour and not per month, since there are legal restrictions about how long you can play per day. So, its really hard to guesstimate.
lol Im sorry boys and girls but Funcom and AoC are not going to tank. It may not be a tremendous financial success in the eyes of consumers on the outside who simply dont have the hard data and really have no idea what is going on with the company and its investors. Since you have no real information about the project and have a couple of standard vanilla documents that reference investing in the company (which most any company seeking investors will have a similar document to give out), you have no basis to form an actual opinion on wether the company is going to make money or lose money. And you wont have anywhere close to a good idea about how the entire AoC project is going until probably a good year after the xbox 360 version is released. So please stop talking like your baseless opinions are facts or that they hold any water whatsoever. If you want to voice your opinions and just make wild predictions than by all means do that, but if you're going to preach it as something different then you just need to shut up.
I kinda doubt AoC sales performance will tank Funcom. AoC as a game isn't bad it is just buggy and incomplete. Selling it, Funcom recooped a lot of money that they can use to continue with the game. As the subs drop funcom's biggest problem is gonna be splitting development between the xbox 360 version and fixing the live game. They might even be able to get some additional funding to support the xbox 360 version with all the positive reviews and promoting the game based on the first 20 levels clearly being outstanding.
I think AoC will become primarily a console game down the road. It kinda feels like the whole design was somewhat oriented on that kinda gameplay and system design.
This clearly states that AoC is the now main source of income for Funcom and if AoC fails; it will have a severe impact on the future for Funcom.
I bet they will be in trouble if it fails. I think they released the game too soon and still buggy because they were runing out of money, so they are not in a confortable situation and if it fails it will be a big problem. IMO of course.
Funcom is not big or well established. Everything they do is pretty much fly by the seat of your pants, with poor planning, preparation, and just enough funding to keep them going. The release state of AO and AoC showed this - and its very questionable whether those were released because they genuinely thought they were ready or because they had just run out of money and were trying to recoup losses.
With the way they handled the pay-for beta and pay-for prelaunch download, and the hiding of what features the game had until after you purchased it, I think its fairly evident they will do just about anything for money. Poorer subscription numbers than they expected will up the ante even more. Personally I dont think there is a company out there that makes a more perfect candidate to sellout to SOE than Funcom.
Waiting for: A skill-based MMO with Freedom and Consequence. Woe to thee, the pierce-ed.
Funcom is not big or well established. Everything they do is pretty much fly by the seat of your pants, with poor planning, preparation, and just enough funding to keep them going. The release state of AO and AoC showed this - and its very questionable whether those were released because they genuinely thought they were ready or because they had just run out of money and were trying to recoup losses. With the way they handled the pay-for beta and pay-for prelaunch download, and the hiding of what features the game had until after you purchased it, I think its fairly evident they will do just about anything for money. Poorer subscription numbers than they expected will up the ante even more. Personally I dont think there is a company out there that makes a more perfect candidate to sellout to SOE than Funcom.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
Funcom is not big or well established. Everything they do is pretty much fly by the seat of your pants, with poor planning, preparation, and just enough funding to keep them going. The release state of AO and AoC showed this - and its very questionable whether those were released because they genuinely thought they were ready or because they had just run out of money and were trying to recoup losses. With the way they handled the pay-for beta and pay-for prelaunch download, and the hiding of what features the game had until after you purchased it, I think its fairly evident they will do just about anything for money. Poorer subscription numbers than they expected will up the ante even more. Personally I dont think there is a company out there that makes a more perfect candidate to sellout to SOE than Funcom.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
Are you serious? 4 AAA titles? roflmao you call The longest Journey and Anarchy-Online AAA ttitles? get the hell out of here for real.
Funcom is not big or well established. Everything they do is pretty much fly by the seat of your pants, with poor planning, preparation, and just enough funding to keep them going. The release state of AO and AoC showed this - and its very questionable whether those were released because they genuinely thought they were ready or because they had just run out of money and were trying to recoup losses. With the way they handled the pay-for beta and pay-for prelaunch download, and the hiding of what features the game had until after you purchased it, I think its fairly evident they will do just about anything for money. Poorer subscription numbers than they expected will up the ante even more. Personally I dont think there is a company out there that makes a more perfect candidate to sellout to SOE than Funcom.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
Are you serious? 4 AAA titles? roflmao you call The longest Journey and Anarchy-Online AAA ttitles? get the hell out of here for real.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
4 triple A titles?
AO was a failure
Dreamfall was met with meh reviews
AoC is showing to be a standard title boarderlining substandard
The longest journey is probably the only game that was really well recieved.
The rest of thier games were either canceled (Steel Rebelion, Midgard), released under the radar or to really poor scores from the press and users (Most games were not even released stateside).
There are 3 types of people in the world. 1.) Those who make things happen 2.) Those who watch things happen 3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Comments
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/28371832@N02/2648951313/[/url]
I can vouch for two that wont be subbing and have quit before the free time is up, giving funcom plenty of cancel time so there wont be any "mistakes" (grin)
-2 Funcom
can you smell that?!!...............there is nothing quite like it.....................the smell of troll in the morning............i love that smell.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
its even less than that i found nowhere exact numbers how much of the money of the boxsales the gamecompany gets in pc games, but for consoles there is this:
http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_rr_game06_1219expensivegames_slide.html?thisSpeed=20000
for pc games there is no console owners fee, but i guess retail, packaging and such numbers will probably be simmilar. this shows that a developer only really gets about 50% of the costs as money to cover the developement costs. so that means they will need over a million boxes sold to recover 30 million from box sales alone.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).
anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).
anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.
FYI the developers get around a third of the box price back, and around half of the subscription amount is operation costs.
Based on the following factors during my time in the game (I was in-game a lot during this time as part of it coincided with a week off work so I got to see the situation at all times of day) I think we will be stretching it to say that 25% of the initial subscribers actually stayed:
The guild I was in and that of a friend, all of which had over 30 players near release were both virtually dead by the time I left , only 1-2 people logged on per day in the guild I was in. One guildmate left to join another guild and he was worried by the lack of the other players logging back in - most of them stopped just before paid subscription. The leader of my guild gave up on AoC and went back to lotro just after subscriptions kicked in.
The number of instances both in the higher level and lower level areas (I played both my 68 main and several alts from levels 5-28 a lot) has dropped dramatically a lot of zones dont even go over one instance spawned. Tortage is one of the few places that still has a few players running around (nowhere close to what was at release), this is probably the die-hard players rolling alts due to the recent class balancing.
OOC and region chat channels had hit near virtual silence the majority of the time on my server. As was noted by someone else on these forums I was actually receiving less goldspam before the end (even the goldsellers seem to be giving AoC up as a bad job).
The number of disgruntled players, goodbye posts and goodbye messages on the forums and from friends in-game.
Difficulty finding groups at all levels. The introduction of the grey-elite fixes also stopped bored players helping out their friends in lower level instances and cut down on farming to fund guild city production.
Lack of players visible when riding from the main cities through to some of the later zones. The game actually felt less crowded while riding through zones and past major mob camps.
This game had some great ideas and if Funcom had stuck to their guns and delivered the game promised it would flourish but they seem bent on destroying what they have already rather than fixing it. Im hopeful that in time it will be worth returning to, but I will be damned if I will pay them while they fix this beta title. I also dont believe that at its current rate of decline that this game will be viable at all in 6 months, never mind a future 360 release. Funcom needs a serious wake-up call.
I'd guess it was obvious to most of us in alpha/beta that AOC was nowhere ready for release. Unfortunately this seems to be the case for almost every MMORPG these days. Companies can't afford to wait, however, sometimes, so they wind up balancing their desire to earn enough revenue to keep running with their desire to present the best product available. Unfortunately the cost of premature releases can be the loss of paying subscribers. Nature of the beast. To us the products are games. To developers the products are just that--products.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
I link you to the article that guy wrote after that one....
wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Age-of-Conan-Poised-to-Dominate-WoW/
Point being. That guy has no credibility and his information is obviously extremely wrong and you can't trust a word of it.
I agree, zero credibility. More than that, his second blog/article is a complete about face. Every point he made in the first article he rebutted in teh second. Its almost as if someone put the frighteners on him--weird. Or maybe he has a new employer
______________
Mark E. Cooper
AKA Tohrment
Proud member of Damned Souls since 2007.
http://www.damnedsouls.eu
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
Lets not forget that what the shops charge customers is the retail price. I have no idea how much Funcom charges retailers on a box by box basis, but if the shops carge us $50, you can be sure Fncom only gets about $20-$30 or less per box.
Whatever it is, these sorts of things are usually sold to retailers on a "sale or return" basis. Any unsold stock is returned, just like the publishing industry.
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Mark E. Cooper
AKA Tohrment
Proud member of Damned Souls since 2007.
http://www.damnedsouls.eu
most likely they are gettin around 20 $ per box or a grand total of 14 million if they have 700k box sales,
respectable to be sure but nowhere near turning a profit yet.
To do that they are going to need a solid longter subsciption base.
Another -1 here and if there was any longevity would have bougt a box and sub for my son too. Enjoying Vanguard as a filler for now. it's not bad at all.
Whilst the early game is fun there is not really much of a MMORPG there. Re-package it as a single player game.
They need a minimum number of subscribers to:
1) operate the game and make a profit
2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development
3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.
4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.
oh and
5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.
They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.
It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.
Not true. 500k x $50 = 25Mil. Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
Sorry to disappoint you bud, but it is not 500k x $50. The game isn't the same price in every country for 1, second thats just for the basic copy, thats not even for the collectors edition ($79.99). Getting Faqs straight FTW.
Meh. Mine was a general guesstimate. Math is still FTW since mine's still correct.
It just might not be accurate. FAQs aren't going to help me with that. And if it's more in other countires that means it costs more for Funcom to sell them to other companies, so it balances out. But I didn't take into account the Collectors edition, and oh well.
Still that's only the money they recently borrowed. I'm not even going to guess the true total expenses of making this game for 4-5 years.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
Not to take away from anything Blizzard has accomplished but there revenue from WoW is nowhere near 150,000,000 per month all the asian accounts were sold to a company for a flat rate per year which makes up 6 million of the acccounts.. Many pay only .50 per month..150,000,000 is GROSSLY exagerated
Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!
Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.
If revenue enough to rival first world nations' revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few games capable of selling 100,000 copies.
Not to take away from anything Blizzard has accomplished but there revenue from WoW is nowhere near 150,000,000 per month all the asian accounts were sold to a company for a flat rate per year which makes up 6 million of the acccounts.. Many pay only .50 per month..150,000,000 is GROSSLY exagerated
In China they pay per hour and not per month, since there are legal restrictions about how long you can play per day. So, its really hard to guesstimate.
lol Im sorry boys and girls but Funcom and AoC are not going to tank. It may not be a tremendous financial success in the eyes of consumers on the outside who simply dont have the hard data and really have no idea what is going on with the company and its investors. Since you have no real information about the project and have a couple of standard vanilla documents that reference investing in the company (which most any company seeking investors will have a similar document to give out), you have no basis to form an actual opinion on wether the company is going to make money or lose money. And you wont have anywhere close to a good idea about how the entire AoC project is going until probably a good year after the xbox 360 version is released. So please stop talking like your baseless opinions are facts or that they hold any water whatsoever. If you want to voice your opinions and just make wild predictions than by all means do that, but if you're going to preach it as something different then you just need to shut up.
I kinda doubt AoC sales performance will tank Funcom. AoC as a game isn't bad it is just buggy and incomplete. Selling it, Funcom recooped a lot of money that they can use to continue with the game. As the subs drop funcom's biggest problem is gonna be splitting development between the xbox 360 version and fixing the live game. They might even be able to get some additional funding to support the xbox 360 version with all the positive reviews and promoting the game based on the first 20 levels clearly being outstanding.
I think AoC will become primarily a console game down the road. It kinda feels like the whole design was somewhat oriented on that kinda gameplay and system design.
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Ethion
I bet they will be in trouble if it fails. I think they released the game too soon and still buggy because they were runing out of money, so they are not in a confortable situation and if it fails it will be a big problem. IMO of course.
another good candidate for the Station Pass maybe?
I miss DAoC
I know I am dissappointing you, but FC is too big and established to become a puppet for SOE.
Funcom is not big or well established. Everything they do is pretty much fly by the seat of your pants, with poor planning, preparation, and just enough funding to keep them going. The release state of AO and AoC showed this - and its very questionable whether those were released because they genuinely thought they were ready or because they had just run out of money and were trying to recoup losses.
With the way they handled the pay-for beta and pay-for prelaunch download, and the hiding of what features the game had until after you purchased it, I think its fairly evident they will do just about anything for money. Poorer subscription numbers than they expected will up the ante even more. Personally I dont think there is a company out there that makes a more perfect candidate to sellout to SOE than Funcom.
Waiting for: A skill-based MMO with Freedom and Consequence.
Woe to thee, the pierce-ed.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
Are you serious? 4 AAA titles? roflmao you call The longest Journey and Anarchy-Online AAA ttitles? get the hell out of here for real.
What about 350 employees, offices in 4 different countries, 4 AAA titles, a couple of projects in development and 600k+ AoC boxes sold?
I think you are overestimating SOEs buying power mate.
Are you serious? 4 AAA titles? roflmao you call The longest Journey and Anarchy-Online AAA ttitles? get the hell out of here for real.
Yes
http://www.gamespot.com/search.html?type=11&stype=all&tag=search%3Bbutton&om_act=convert&om_clk=search&qs=anarchy+online&x=0&y=0
http://www.gamespot.com/search.html?type=11&stype=all&tag=search%3Bbutton&qs=the+longest+journey&x=0&y=0
I think 9.3 in gamespot can be well considered AAA title.
4 triple A titles?
AO was a failure
Dreamfall was met with meh reviews
AoC is showing to be a standard title boarderlining substandard
The longest journey is probably the only game that was really well recieved.
The rest of thier games were either canceled (Steel Rebelion, Midgard), released under the radar or to really poor scores from the press and users (Most games were not even released stateside).
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"