Funcom Lied About AoC Sales

[Tessera]

Here's a chart, which might help to put a lot of this crappola into perspective...




Back when Age Of Conan first launched, Funcom puffed out their chests and boasted that AoC was "a big hit... generating 700,000 initial sales."

And here we see the essence of PURE HYPE, because all of those statements by Funcom were completely (and deliberately) misleading.

The truth of the matter can be seen in the pie chart above. The fact is that initially, Funcom *shipped* roughly 700,000 copies of AoC to various retail outlets. But when you look closely at the chart, you can see that 40 percent (nearly half) of those copies of AoC were never sold. They just sat there on the retail shelves, or in the warehouses of online retailers like Amazon.com... collecting dust.

In truth, only about 420,000 copies of AoC were actually bought and paid for by consumers. And of that number, only a small handful of people actually stayed with the game and became active subscribers. The rest of them either quit playing the game after seeing how utterly shitty it was during their free 30-day trial, or else they quickly returned the game to the stores for a refund, due to its ridiculous system requirements.


So let's distill all of this data down into something that Funcom doesn't want you to know about...

Back around launch day, Funcom claimed that they had sold 700,000 copies of AoC. Funcom not only lied about their actual retail sales -- they continued to lie about their number of active subscribers. But the truth is that they only ended up with a measly 70,000 subscribers... a mere one-tenth of what their hype was trying to claim as "initial sales figures."

Now that is a very dismal performance record, if I say so myself. And there is absolutely no way that Funcom can keep AoC afloat indefinitely with such pitiful financial returns. I don't see how it is possible for them to have even recouped their initial research and development costs... not with a population as small as what they have right now. And that population is getting smaller every single day.

Is it any wonder that AoC has merged their original 20-plus servers down to a minuscule number (about a half-dozen) of functioning realms..? And if you check out any of those servers, you will see that they are absolutely desolate of other players. It's like a big ghost town over there... especially on the PvP servers.

Like I keep telling people: STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO INDUSTRY HYPE. The industry will lie, cheat and steal if they have to. Anything to keep their investors in the dark.

But the facts do not lie. AoC is totally dying. Frankly, I am amazed that it has even lasted this long. But considering the fact that Funcom has desperately offered several "play for 2 weeks for free" deals in just the past year, I think it is safe to say that this game will not be around for very much longer. From the very beginning, AoC has been a mismanaged and overly-hyped mess. The game engine sucks; the graphics are nowhere near good enough to justify AoC's ridiculous system requirements; the combat and PvP systems are both incredibly wonky and imbalanced; they fired their first game director (Gaute Godager) before the game was even a year old and replaced him with another nitwit who is almost as incompetent; they callously alienated the modding community within six months of launch day; and their GM's are quite possibly the stupidest idiots that I have ever seen in an MMO (anybody remember the cybersex scandal, between a player and a Funcom GM?)

The only distinguishing feature of AoC is that it includes bare breasts... and like truly clueless morons, Funcom has been doing everything that they can to downplay what is -- quite truthfully --- the game's only redeeming feature. In fact, just about all of the "adult content" that was promised during the AoC beta is completely non-existent today. It's fucking pitiful.

What a big, shitty waste. But hey... I warned them, back in 2007. Lots of people warned them... and we were laughed at. But if there is one thing that we know for sure, it is the fact that greedy assholes who wear polyester suits never, ever listen to their own customers... until it's too late.  


MY PREDICTION: before the end of 2010, AoC will be nothing but a bad memory. The only thing that *might* save AoC at this point would be if Funcom opened up the game to player-made content (mods). And that is not very likely to happen, because Funcom is administered by headstrong idiots... all of whom do not understand that their pride go-eth before a fall.



Edited to embed a link to a thread on the AoC cybersex scandal elsewhere on this site. Funny shit.

[anariel]

Strangely enough, when AoC was launched about half the people I knew in WoW said "this will rock! it's the end of WoW, they launnched TBC half-backed to try to keep people playing" and things like that.

I had seen only reviews... PAYOLA reviews, I must add... and my response at the time was "that game requires WHAT? For the fucking hiperrealistic WATER?" That and the combat system (complicate combos... in an online game... a little lag and bye bye, char...) settled my mind in "avoid at all costs".

Never heard of the cibersex incident, though... But I hear about the "big big breasts bug", which leaded to an urgent patch which made all female characters (PC and NPC alike) breastless... and the subsecuent loss of tons of customers told me all what was needed.

Good ideas of the game? Guild castles, buildable by all. WoW copied that with the "guild talent trees", to an extent. About the player houses... I seriously doubt we will ever see something like that (unless the "player room" is an off-line instance where to play the sims...)

[Tessera]

And did you hear the latest..?

Funcom is giving away "epic loot" for free, if you sign up to play AoC before Christmas.

HOW DESPERATE AND CLUELESS CAN THESE ASSHOLES BE..?

Psssst.... hey Funcom..? Give it up. Your game is dead, your staff is inept, your future
is questionable and your fan base has all but deserted you. You ignored us. Now ESAD.

[Steeal]

And did you hear the latest..?

Funcom is giving away "epic loot" for free, if you sign up to play AoC before Christmas.

HOW DESPERATE AND CLUELESS CAN THESE ASSHOLES BE..?

Psssst.... hey Funcom..? Give it up. Your game is dead, your staff is inept, your future
is questionable and your fan base has all but deserted you. You ignored us. Now ESAD.

It's much more hilarious with the picture.   :laugh:

TWITTER!!!

FACEBOOK!!!

[Tessera]

LMAO... and they're getting even MORE desperate now.

Yet another FREE OFFER..!!! YAY..!!!

http://www.examiner.com/x-544-Games-Examiner~y2009m12d15-Play-Age-of-Conan-free-for-first-twenty-levels

Now they're offering to let new subscribers (suckers) play for free in Tortage (which is where you do your first 20 levels in AoC). Well gee... how very clever of Funcom. Because you see... Tortage is the ONLY section of AoC that is actually worth a damn. Unlike the bulk of AoC, Tortage actually has a coherent plot, as well as being fairly bug-free and well-developed. All of the NPC's have spoken dialogue and the quest rewards are decent.

But once you leave Tortage (aka "the newbie zone"), the rest of the game falls flat on its face. The vast majority of AoC is -nothing- like Tortage. Not even a little bit. The first 20 levels in AoC are fun... but the next SIXTY levels are AWFUL and BORING and CHILDISH and TOTALLY UNINSPIRED. Take it from me... a guy who at one point had no less than five level 80 toons in AoC (yes, it is really that easy to level up as a Demonologist character). Why so many level 80's..? Simple... because there is absolutely no high-end game to speak of in AoC and so, you end up creating an endless series of alts. And after more than a year-and-a-half since it was launched, AoC -still- doesn't have any high-end game worth a damn, nor have there been any significant improvements to the post-Tortage gameplay.

So basically, Funcom is saying "We'll let you play the ONLY good part of this game for free... in the hope that you'll be suckered into paying for the rest of our hopelessly lost craptastic."

Give it up, Funcom. Your game is dead. Your own childish content decisions are what killed it... and you just don't want to accept it. If you had paid attention to people like me and others during beta, then you might have had a minor hit on your hands for adult gamers. Instead, you greedily went after the kiddie market... and you wound up alienating EVERYONE, by turning your game into a dumbed-down and sophomoric bore-fest, whose only saving grace is that it has tits. The result is a confused game that is desperately in need of an identity. Is AoC an adult game..? Nope. Is it a kids' game..? Nope. I have no idea what Age Of Conan is... but I do know one thing for sure: it definitely isn't FUN.

[Digital_Hype]

I have to agree that AoC does not have the end game content to keep high level players as paying subscribers. Also when I started playing I was surprised that there was hardly any NPC dialogue after Tortage. It just had that unfinished feel to it going from Tortage to 20+ content.

I was attracted to AoC because of the adult content which some say is slowly dwindling. I wasn't around when any of the mods for nude patches were working before Funcom broke the Directx hook by somehow hiding the .tga files which imo sucked for the modding community since the models here looked so much better ; ) meh to xbox 360, I hope their sales suck since thats the most likely reason they patched the PC version of the game.

Btw I don't know if the offer is still valid but they were also offering trial accounts to purchase the client for 4.95 which tells me they are hurting for a player base.

[Tessera]

Age Of Conan continues to die a slow death.


For the fifth time in the space of a year, they are once again merging what is left of their servers:


http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?p=2622435#post2622435



Keep telling yourselves that you know what is best for your game, Funcom. And by all means,
keep trying to imitate everyone else's products (like WoW), instead of establishing a unique
identity of your own. Why be original, when you can follow a winning formula, eh..?

Except that it's not a winning formula. Not when the public expected an actual Conan game based
upon the fantasy worlds of Robert E. Howard. What you gave them instead was "Conan" in name
only... and so incredibly censored and bland that it is simply not very entertaining at all.

How does it feel to have painted yourselves into a corner, Funcom..? You should have listened to us.

AoC started out with over 20 servers. Now down to FOUR. Count 'em... FOUR lousy little underpopulated servers.

Totally fucking clueless.  


In related news... Funcom resorts to blackmail, in a pitifully transparent attempt to regain lost subscribers:

http://www.mmocrunch.com/2010/01/11/funcom-turns-to-blackmail/

SUMMARY: Funcom is threatening to delete inactive characters, unless the owners of those characters give Funcom their money.

Un. Fucking. Believable. How low will you assholes stoop to save your worthless MMO..?!
The dozen or so "come back and play for free" offers didn't work, so now you're threatening
to delete characters that cost you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to leave on your servers..?

Whores... pure and simple. Funcom = whores. Soon to be out-of-business whores, I might add.

[anariel]

WoW already "threats" to delete all characters in an account after 6 months of inactivity... And I think it has been that way since the opening of the game.

Ironically, Age of Conan was presented as an alternative for WoW... making everything different from the Blizzard's game XD

[Tessera]

WoW already "threats" to delete all characters in an account after 6 months of inactivity... And I think it has been that way since the opening of the game.

I have more than a dozen inactive WoW toons still sitting there on their servers, most of which were created all the way back in late 2004 and early 2005. I haven't played most of those toons since mid-2005. And they're still there... five years later.

I don't know of anyone who has ever had a character deleted from Blizzard's servers, either. I'm not saying that it never happens... I'm just saying that I have never heard of it happening.

The fact is that a character on an MMO server represents a tiny, almost insignificant amount of data within their database. You could probably store the data for a MILLION characters on a 4GB thumb drive... that's how small the character files are. Take a look at a gamesave file for one of your Diablo II single-player toons sometime. That's about the same size as the file for a WoW character in Blizzard's database. We're talking small here.

And the Age Of Conan MMO has far less than a million subscribers. Infinitely less, at this point. So they essentially have no excuse for what they are doing... other than to strong-arm their former subs into signing up again. The carrot method hasn't worked -- so now Funcom is using a stick.

Well, that won't work either. AoC = DYING.

[Terith]

Well, that won't work either. AoC = DYING.

Age of Conan was a game that I was almost as hyped up for as I was WoW. It was in fact researching the game that made me pick up Howard's stories (I was actually totally unaware the Schwarzenegger movies were in fact based on literature much older) and I was smitten. Howard breathed new life into my interest in Fantasy, and I became a hardcore fan of this new dark/low fantasy, as opposed to the glitter and shine of High fantasy I'd become so used to (i.e. Final Fantasy, WoW, Neverwinter Nights). Then I began to fall in love with Howard's friend and literary colleague, none other than H.P. Lovecraft, and enjoyed how much they drew elements from each other's works.

Ever the role-player, I latched on to every piece of pre-release news that came out about the game. MMO's, for me, are ways I can immerse myself into a body of lore and experience it through role-play, and I was thrilled about being able to see these places from Howard's stories come to life with my soon-to-be Stygian sorcerer.

Fast forward to release...

I don't think anyone was less than impressed with Conan's artistic beauty. Tortage truly looked straight out of Howard's imagination of a pre-civilized community. The combat was immersive, and I grinned with glee when my demonologist set a pesky pirate ablaze with a fatality. One of my fondest memories of Tortage was when I fought my first demon. The altars and architecture of the area were so "Lovecraftian", and again I was truly amazed by the game's art department.

But all good things come to an end

I don't want to repeat what's already been said about Post-Tortage AoC. I guess I could add that it got so bad I couldn't even finish the grind to 80. I was on a PvP server as well, tyring to level during a period where mages were not the best at holding their own if ganked. I think my biggest dissapointment though was the sheer lack of role-play I was so excited to get into. The instanced zones were a huge turnoff, as was the "eye candy" factor. I rolled into whatever the capital was for Stygia, and geekasmed at the spooky pyramids and temples off in the distance, running through all the great possibilites for Rp...but you couldn't even get to them. Building after building was closed off, and  unlike WoW where you could go find some un-MOB'd, neat little area in some random zone where a lot of great stories could take place - the best you got here was taverns.

Again, I haven't even included the bugs, altered/cut/watered down content (Spell combos immediatley come to mind), lackluster gameplay and crafting, poor community (at least on my server), low pop, class imbalance, joke pvp, and the fact that the game is really just horrible after the newbie zone.

This game was the biggest shame and letdown of the decade if you ask me.

[Tessera]

You wanna laugh..?

Take a look at the current retail price for Age Of Conan:

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Conan-Hyborian-Adventures-Pc/dp/B000RZPW9W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1270767214&sr=1-1

Six bucks at Amazon. Recently dropped down from ten bucks. And keep in mind that this game was originally fifty bucks, when it was released less than two years ago.

Obviously, the recent release of their much-hyped expansion pack has done little to resurrect AoC's slow and painful death.

[Kandid]

Does the retail price still include 1 free month? I can give it a try. Also, If I recall correctly, they are porting the game to Crapbox 360, do you guys think they can somehow connect PC and 360 players in the same realms? It would be interesting.

[anariel]

Mmm... if there is a keyboard-like and mouse-like controller for the crapbox, then there would be no problem about that. After all, they have done it with FPS shooters like Modern Warfare 2... ("they" as in "a gaming company" ^^U).

However, unless they give some sort of security about the realm status (they are not going to drop it just like that), I doubt a lot of people will invest time in a game which can vanish like a mirage any time.

[Tessera]

The upcoming AoC expansion, entitled "Rise Of The Godslayer," gives us even more examples of just how desperate Funcom is to gain more subscribers.

First of all, this "expansion" is not really an expansion at all. I've looked over the list of "new content" that will be included... and guess what..? About 90 percent of this so-called "expansion" consists of repairs to the literally HUNDREDS of things which are broken, unfinished or missing from the plain vanilla game. For example, there was always a problem in leveling from 20 to 40, due to a serious lack of quests. So, all of us who were there back on launch day ended up doing a crapload of grinding throughout those levels. Well, the upcoming expansion promises to add "an exciting new zone" to AoC and guess what..? It's a 20 to 40 zone. Gee... what a coincidence.

There are quite a few other examples which in their totality are, quite frankly, nothing more than a gigantic PATCH for AoC. And yet, Funcom is unashamedly charging $19.95 for Rise Of The Godslayer... which is quite literally a LONG OVERDUE patch masquerading as an expansion. It SHOULD be totally free of charge, because it is not a proper expansion at all. It is simply a massive band-aid for a game which has been hopelessly incomplete and mismanaged ever since the day that it was first conceived.

But it gets even better...

To sweeten the pot even further, Funcom is offering a "new feature" for everyone who is stupid enough to fork out 20 bucks for a glorified patch. What is this new feature, you may ask..? Well, I'll tell you. It's being called "offline leveling."

Yes... I said "offline leveling." That wasn't a typo.

This is where most of you will look at me quizzically and ask "What the fuck is 'offline leveling,' Tessera..? How the hell do you level up in an MMO if you aren't even online..?"

The answer... as incredible as it seems... is this: Funcom is going to make it possible for you to level up your AoC character WITHOUT ACTUALLY LOGGING IN OR PLAYING THE GAME. Basically, you will be able to create a new toon (or a bunch of new toons, for that matter) and then just leave them sitting there on their respective servers. And after that, just go away for two or three months, without ever once logging into that character. And guess what you will find, when you come back several months later..? Yup, you guessed it: your new toons... characters that you have never actually played... will have magically leveled up all by themselves.

Well gee... like, wow... Funcom is actually going to produce an MMO that nobody actually needs to play..!!! Wooo hoo...!!! And all for the paltry fee of only $15.00 per month. Who could resist..?

...

You just can't make this shit up, folks. We're seeing the very definition of "pathetic, shameless whores" here.

[anariel]

Uhhh... I think that is a somewhat response to EVE online's leveling system... However, EVE is not assembled around character levels (or skills, which is what you actually level up... you state to your toon you wanna him to study a skill, and after a time he will gain a level in that skill, no matter if you were playing the game or not), but the ships (which requires money to be bought, supplied, etc...).

Ah, WoW Cataclysm has entered Alpha (friends & family), and it seems you need to discover a dungeon before being able to use the LFM dungeon system (good part: people will know where in the hell are the dungeons, bad part: if you have some alters, it will be a fucking boring nightmare), and it seems to access to the heroic version you might need some attunement... (reminds you of something? Yeah, the heroic keys form Outland's dungeons... which meant you had to grind your way across the normal version of the dungeon countless times...). This suggests me... there won't be much dungeons. Or raids. Or life for the WoW itself...

[Tessera]

It's nothing at all like what you are talking about.

In the game Eve Online... which I have played in the past... you can elect to train a specific skill or ability. And then, it takes a certain number of hours before that particular skill has been fully trained, regardless of whether you are actually logged in or not. But you don't actually gain a full character level... you are just training one of MANY different skills that your character can possess.  

What they are planning to do in Age Of Conan is totally different. In this case, you will actually gain entire character levels without actually having to play the game. To get this into perspective, imagine for a moment that you create a new character in World Of Warcraft. And after you create your new character... a level 1 mage, for example... you log out of the game and then go away for two months.

And when you come back after two months, your mage is now level 30... or whatever. That is what Funcom is planning to do in AoC, and it's absolutely retarded. The only reason they are doing this is because they are desperate for subscribers. The problem is that once somebody subscribes to AoC, they usually lose interest in this broken game after a couple of weeks or so. Therefore, they wisely cancel their subscription and Funcom stops getting any more money out of that person. So by introducing "offline leveling," Funcom is basically trying to induce people to maintain their subscriptions... by promising that their characters will now be leveled up automatically in their absence. Get the picture..? Corporate prostitution at its finest.

They may as well be saying "It's okay if you lose interest in AoC after a few weeks. No worries... we'll play the game FOR you and level up your toons. All you gotta do is keep paying us a monthly fee."

I have seen a lot of revolting things in the MMO industry, but this new "offline leveling" scam from Funcom very definitely takes the cake.

[indeed777]

That is a really horrible idea. I'm just looking at this from a player's perspective here for a moment. Say you sit out for a month and gain twenty levels. I can't imagine that you'd even be able to play in those higher level zones because your gear would suck. Frankly, I'm surprised that there are still servers up for this game.

[Tessera]

Or how about this:

Imagine raiding with a bunch of people who hardly ever played their class, because they took advantage of Funcom's new "auto-level" crap..?

Are those people going to know how to play their class..? Will they perform expertly during your raid..? Or is it more likely that they'll be totally clueless and end up having to be carried by everyone else in that raid..?

The AoC community is gonna be suffering with a shitload of unskilled slackers in the high levels soon.