I searched online and sources from years ago state that Funcom lost about $50 million on this project, one of the biggest flops in video game history at that time.
But, with Secret World Legends, TSW kept going and had a chance to earn a profit or at least break even. Did that ever happen now that we’re about a decade later?
Really? I had never heard the The Secret World was such a failure. Do you have a handy link available?
I knew it wasn’t a huge hit or anything, but to have lost Funcom $50 million seems…amazing.
Apparently it was actually $52 million:
That kind of explains…everything. Heartbreaking.
I checked and saw that all of the “news” on what a catastrophic failure TSW was date to the launch year of 2012. Meaning, I suspect, that Funcom put $52 million into building the game and didn’t instantly make it all back. If TSW really were as bad as they imply, it and SWL wouldn’t still be here. Break even? Who knows. But it must be making Funcom money.
I’m not surprised TSW didn’t do well. For one they’re a badly managed company. Their website sucked, still sucks, and always had problems. I constantly had bank issues trying to get subscriptions. ON top of that, the original experience was not at all new player friendly. I remember severely struggling in the game and nothing was ever explained. I remember people always said they loved their was no hand holding, apparently in the long run it did damage because I saw reveiwers complain about it. They never allowed ability wheel respecs so if you started a build you hated, you’d either have to reroll to just deal with it. ANd because of the insane variety the game had respeccing was very much needed. Everyone kept saying “you get every skill eventually” yes, like 1000 hours into the game. You expect people to wait that long people are not gonna play the game.
This is what happens when you make an MMO that appeals to a hardcore difficulty audience. It was only a few years into the game did they make it more easy.
I seem to recall them getting huge amounts of Norwegian government funding, so maybe that hit was cushioned
They can’t make a profit after shutting down the name and the customer service. Existing players can still buy things, but there is no way for new customers to buy keys, when they are very much in demand. So yeah, it will never break even, it’s a ‘dead’ game in the sense that there are no legit new copies out there.
No wonder why Funcom hates this game so much but can’t let go. It’s full of bitter memories.