The bad news parade for
Age of Conan doesn't look like it's going to stop until it pulls a
Tabula Rasa.
TenTonHammer has confirmed layoffs at developer Funcom's US branch. Although the company would only acknowledge "staffing cuts," TTH reported rumors that 70% of the staff, mostly from the customer service and quality assurance departments, were let go.
Although it's certainly no secret that
Age of Conan is hurting at this point, the QA and CS departments are the two bookends of support on many MMORPGs. When there's no need for them, it speaks volumes about what happens next.
[Via
Game|Life]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
zygote55 @ Nov 24th 2008 7:04PM
*Crickets*
another.day.another.way @ Nov 24th 2008 7:09PM
Honestly, is anyone really surprised.
Welcome to the world of MMOs when you are not Blizzard.
juju187 @ Nov 24th 2008 7:12PM
R.I.P
may you live on,
sailing on a pirate ship.
Sidebuster @ Nov 24th 2008 7:14PM
When you make a game that is for the short run, people are not going to stick around for the long run. All that instancing and fake ass crafting (that I never got to experience because you could only start it around end level WTF?) was the cause. Just look at Tabula Rasa. I liked that game, but there was nothing to do. Nothing but missions that felt the same.
Games like Everquest build worlds in which you can live out your fantasy. MMO Devs now just build epic armor and weapons and raid bosses you can get it from. The stats are killing MMO's
Sidebuster @ Nov 24th 2008 7:15PM
Etc. Etc. :)
Shagittarius @ Nov 24th 2008 7:21PM
To crush your QA department, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of CS.
Dave @ Nov 24th 2008 7:41PM
Ha! Nicely done.
axion22 @ Nov 24th 2008 7:38PM
And Blizzard breathes a sigh of relief... right? :3
TwistedBishop @ Nov 24th 2008 7:40PM
Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa are absolutely nothing alike. You're comparing TR, which sold maybe 200k at best, with a game that sold over 800k inside a month.
I can't imagine the situation wherein Funcom would need to close down AoC. The company isn't hurting for funds (last report had them with 30 million in cash) and there is no possible way that AoC is less profitable than other MMOs still hanging around in limbo like DDO and Vanguard (each with under 50k subscribers). NCSoft is a company with a history of abandoning MMOs. Funcom isn't. If they've kept Anarchy Online going these past 7 years, AoC shouldn't be in danger.
bluemouse @ Nov 24th 2008 9:42PM
So these layoffs are... what? A good sign? Please.
TwistedBishop @ Nov 24th 2008 10:07PM
I didn't say it was a good thing or a bad thing. What it isn't is any strong proof that the game is about to close down.
BananaBoat @ Nov 25th 2008 3:47AM
It isn't a good thing, but it is how the market works. It used to be that an MMO could live on a few thousand players (the first MMO I ever played, named Baram, is still going ten years later, even in the US under the title "Nexus: The Kingdom of the winds" with only a thousand subscribers at the most) but Age of Conan's failure has proven that you need to retain a large player base if you want your game to survive.
What exactly was wrong with Age of Conan anyway? I remember all that hype at launch, with game critics calling it the WoW killer, and saying that the combat was incredibly fun etc. Nearly a million copies sold, and now it is going down in flames? It is hard to believe that a game could go from on top of the world to rock bottom in that short of a time.
TwistedBishop @ Nov 25th 2008 4:29AM
Honestly, I'm confused at your logic here. You're saying that Age of Conan has proven something with it's failure and death, when it hasn't failed and hasn't died.
Are you looking at its success based purely on it destroying WoW? While the media is obsessed with the whole "WoW killer" idea, let's be honest about AoC: it was a game that was graphically demanding, sometimes extremely so, and it was full of violence, nudity and sexuality. Even Funcom had to know it would be a niche audience at best. And yet it broke sales records of every previously released MMO with the exception of WoW.
There's nothing that makes one MMO, like LotRO, different from sustaining than Age of Conan. The standard of success jumps wildly from WoW (with 12 million subscribers bringing billions a year) to everything else (where hitting 500k is an absolute rarity and immensely profitable). LotRO has maybe 300k subscribers, and it's doing fine. City of Heroes/Villains has maybe 100k. DDO, which launched in early 2006, has perhaps 50k. Vanguard, which launched alongside Burning Crusade in early 2007, has under 40k. The old original Everquest is still the top of the heap for sustained subscribers after WoW, with a whopping 450k at its peak.
The reality of the MMO industry is a very different from what WoW's sucess leads people to believe. We don't look at every console game and say "well, it didn't beat Halo's sales, guess that flopped". Why judge MMOs differently?
BananaBoat @ Nov 25th 2008 5:12AM
When referring to failure, I meant failure to keep most of the 800k people that bought the game at launch. You could also say that it is circling the drain, and on the way to shutting down, which is what the joystiq article is referencing (when you get rid of the support staff that make an MMO possible, it only leads to speculation that the game is going offline, which makes even more players leave, which could potentially make it happen). At the very least, I doubt they can afford the cost of any new expansion packs etc, which only hurts their position against the likes of WoW and LOTRO.
So sure, it's not over yet, and they could still turn it around, but Tabula Rasa and Hellgate London never did, so it is hard to expect AOC to succeed where they failed.
ahallam @ Nov 25th 2008 12:08AM
Hrm.. Maybe they can put some effort back into the sequel to Dreamfall then. IMO, it's looking like a bad decision to bet the farm on the sweet (yet unproven) lure of monthly revenues when they already had a market ready to buy into the Longest Journey series.
Sometimes, companies should stick with what they know. That's certainly a philosophy that's worked for Blizzard.
Jay @ Nov 25th 2008 3:39AM
Two of the main issues with AoC have been bad CSR support and poor QA. Is it such a shock that just these staff members are being fired when someone new is in charge?
Nmaster @ Nov 25th 2008 6:52PM
Uhhh, no? The (now mostly lost) FunCom CS staff was one kick-ass bunch of guys (and couple gals).
FunCom overhired, and now the game is less buggy, has less players, and we're in a recession. Dur.
Shagittarius @ Nov 26th 2008 11:23AM
Yeah CS was awesome, especially that one CS guy who got fired for attempting to have cyber-sex with a customer.
JoeTheBlow @ Nov 25th 2008 4:19AM
You pay all that money both for the game then PER MONTH, then hundreds of hours in-game, all for nothing when the servers get the plug pulled.
All that does is make WoW seem even more stable. I haven't touched WoW in years and my character in years is still there, waiting for me, should i ever get time to go back to it. (unlikely)
All MMO's now look like short-run bets, something to distract you for a few months till the next WoW refresh.
Eon @ Nov 25th 2008 4:56AM
Well, the problem is that most games come out with a limited set of content at launch and then add to it as they go along. That's just what WOW did.
However, WOW was competing in a marketplace that can most kindly be described as stagnant when it launched. Every MMO that is launched is competing, day 1, with some VERY stiff competition.
WOW now has very stable code, a graphics engine old enough to work on the majority of PCs and years and years of iterative add-ons and expansions.
In my mind the only MMO that has survived the WOW-factor is Eve - which does so by having manageable costs, lots of smaller updates and incredibly differentiated gameplay.
Whether Warhammer can prove that there is room for more than one huge AAA fantasy MMO or not remains to be seen.
warlock7 @ Nov 25th 2008 8:17AM
C'mon, the writing is on the wall and the only people that don't see it/want to see it are the people playing the game. This was supposed to bury WoW, it didn't, now as the company goes down the toilet, it will be remembered as the little game that just couldn't...
TwistedBishop @ Nov 25th 2008 8:26AM
"This was supposed to bury WoW..."
No, it wasn't.
Lord Negatron @ Nov 25th 2008 9:16AM
Lol, although i've been playing Warcraft since the beginning. I find anything that is an MMORPG is automatically compared to WoW. Im with TwistedBishop on this one.
This was never meant "to bury WoW." The only thing to end WoW will be it self/time. Almost every website has a Free 10 day WoW trial Ad, just one thing out of the crazy marketing campaign to raise its popularity. Other than that, AoC is its own entity.
peepoop @ Nov 25th 2008 9:25AM
Hardly a shock. Yes, it sold a tonne in the first month, but very few people chose to pay for more playtime at the end of the "free" (heh) period. There's "a bit rough around the edges" and there's "let's make a list of things that work properly starting with... err...".
Good riddance to bad rubbish. I still resent wasting money on this pile of crap.
MrLee @ Nov 25th 2008 9:48AM
I like the way the 'evidence' to support your claim that "it's no secret Funcom is hurting" is a link to another opinion piece written by yourself two months ago. How about getting some actual facts for a change? Like from the recent press conference for example? But that wouldn't support the doom and gloom story you are intent on writing regardless of the actual situation would it?
It's a shame Joystick is turning into a cheep tabloid where facts are less important than making a scandalous headline. Some people just lost their jobs but hey, lets kick them in the teeth and point the finger at them, it's only a month to Christmas afterall.
Anam @ Nov 25th 2008 10:07AM
I don't know. Seems to me that firing people is fairly credible evidence that suggests that a game isn't making as much money as the company had hoped.
Besides, their "opinion piece" linked sources to back up that opinion, so what's the problem?
Lord Negatron @ Nov 25th 2008 11:17AM
Well, its "AoC is hurting" not Funcom, and the last little "onion piece" was researched and quoted, not made up:
"Funcom's new Game Director for AoC, Craig Morrison, writes on the game's forums that server merging, in both Europe and North America, will soon occur."
Joystiq's no cheap tabloid.
The more you know...
Anam @ Nov 25th 2008 10:01AM
You know, I tried it for a little while. But when my "low fantasy" priest goes around zapping everything with bolts of lightning just like every other fantasy RPG, I begin to wonder what the difference is between this and high fantasy. That and everything from the controls to the early quests just felt like WoW.
Now, to be fair, maybe the game gets better, but that excuse just doesn't cut it. I'm not going to pay $10-$15 a month for a game to see if it gets better. MMO developers need to stop thinking like that and start delivering from minute one... or they can accept that I won't bother playing long enough to become a subscriber, if they'd rather have it that way.
Anam @ Nov 25th 2008 10:08AM
Er, I mean laying off people, rather than firing.
Jo @ Nov 25th 2008 2:04PM
"Two of the main issues with AoC have been bad CSR support and poor QA. Is it such a shock that just these staff members are being fired when someone new is in charge?"
Hahahahaha. That's not the way it is at all. Most if not all of the staff they let go were excellent. This lay-off had nothing to do with new management - Funcom was just forced to make cuts and had to choose people. If you want to blame someone for "bad CSR support and poor QA", blame the higher-ups for making the rules and limiting what the staff could do. Don't blame the lowest people on the totem pole that tried so hard to do the best job they could. They wanted nothing more than to keep customers happy.