Funcom Buisness Discussion

Secret World Legends General Discussion
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This is confusing. Issnt this pushing your playerbase to steam? I dont think a player cares much if the game lanches with the funcom client or steam client. But this way funcom loses money because I seriously doubt steam doesnt take a cut of these sales.

Give players the same deal with the funcom client and take all the money yourself to do … With (fill in the dot’s)

Also it looks like no extra story is unlocked if you buy these, just some points which you get by playing anyways. Some shards which you get from playing and a agent a pet and some cosmetics. Which I never cared for but hey, if cosmetics is your thing go for it.

It a f2p model so i guess you gotta earn some money but here is a idea…why not host a sale yourself? Lots of other publishers do it.

Something like 1 time per month get dubble or even triple the aurum for x amount of money

You would get a lot more income this way because people will be waiting for the monthly sale and the babana’s

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Funcom still trying to milk money with sales for a game that has had no updates since last year. :roll_eyes: .

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Shock news as business tries to make profit from a product it sells!!

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There’s this never-heard concept called “ethics”. You can apply it to the word “business”, which creates a sub-category of “ethics” called “business ethics”.

Considering “business ethics”, in this case Funcom as a business can make two choices: the ethical, which would mean respecting your customers, present and new ones, by being transparent about the state of the game. Maybe even making it official that developer support has been dropped.
Or take the unethical path: no official news and keep attracting new customers with your dead product, catching a few whales occasionally who are prone to gambling with caches.

But hey! Profit is profit!

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Actually, the ethical thing for a business to do is for them to continue to make the maximum profit for their shareholders and investors, allowing them to continue to pay their staff and the studios.

If they were saying that they were actively developing the game when they aren’t, that would be unethical (and fraudulent).
It’s not unethical to keep selling an old product. You can’t blame the company’s ethics because you (and others) have made assumptions on incomplete information.

It’d be poor business ethics to take unnecessary actions which would hurt the company income. Trying to take the moral highground in this situation doesn’t really work, as they haven’t mis-represented anything, it’s entirely down to you/us.

New players are continuing to discover and enjoy the game. The lack of new content doesn’t change that. It may well limit the amount of enjoyment that some players who have been around for a long time now derive from the game, but it doesn’t mean that new players somehow have a less enjoyable experience. It doesn’t even mean that existing players are being harmed.

All it means is that you’re trying to find further justification for being unhappy that there’s no further development on the horizon (or potentially beyond it). That doesn’t mean that the game should shut down though, just because you aren’t being fed fresh new content. That’s got nothing to do with ethics, just your own sense of entitlement.

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And here you are already wrong. Businesses are not entitled to any money customers pay them. It’s a privilege they earn by being a successful business. Businesses are not obligated to succeed, businesses are allowed to fail and go bankrupt. Businessess are not obligated to provide stable jobs for their employees. Shareholdes and investors are not entitled to profits. Businesses fail and that’s the risk investor takes.

Customers aren’t entitled to anything either. They take the risk of investing money into a product that may fail. But respect and decency are attributes a customer should expect as the very minimum for the money they invested. That’s where ethics come into play.

This game is so meaningful in terms of income that it didn’t even get a mention on the latest financial report. Trying to justify lack of any communication while praying on whales to minimize the losses they suffered from this project just makes you an apologist. That’s a very unethical business practice from customer’s perspective. What exactly is stopping Funcom from removing all forms of monetization in exchange for cutting out all (remaining) support and running a cheap cloud server to keep the game up for the remaining couple hundred players? It’s been done before by other failed games, one game I played even refunded purchases to the paying players. That’s ethical business.

That’s what I’m suggesting. Remove monetization and keep the game up without dev support. No harm to either new or present players, while regaining some respect in the eyes of the customer.

As I already mentioned twice, game doesn’t need to “shut down” for it to be enjoyed. Since there is no further development, why should Funcom be entitled to any money from this game? This is the definition of unethical business practice.

I’m not unhappy about the game, not at all. I’m unhappy that Funcom shows no signs of respect or decency to their customers.

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I’m not sure why you’re equating the idea that businesses don’t always succeed with ethics. There are unethical successfull businesses and ethical businesses which fail. The two are not linked (though the public backlash at revelations of unethical decision making may impact a business’s profits).

Respect and decency are not attributes a customer should expect. The only thing that a customer should expect is that the product that they have purchased functions as described and is fit for purpose. If the company is misrepresenting their product and misleading the customer, that is unethical, but that’s not about the customer, it’s about the product.

Funcom hasn’t mislead us about the future development of SWL, they just haven’t given us any information either way. Depending on personal perspective, there will be people who say that means that the game is dead and there is no further expansion planned, and there will be others who say that there is stuff coming, just not any time soon.
If they had said there is stuff being worked on but there isn’t really, then that’s poor ethics as it’s fraud. But they didn’t, so it’s irritating for the players who don’t know for sure either way, but ethically it’s sound.

There’s no real justification for removing the monetization model. The product that people are paying for is no different now to the one a year ago. The description of it hasn’t changed, the features all remain, the benefits of paying are all still the same. The popularity has decreased, which often leads to discounted prices as consumers are less likely to pay a premium price for what is no longer regarded as a premium product, but there’s no ethical argument which says that just because something is no longer premium it should be free. Given that the game is still free to play and doesn’t require you to pay for it, there’s nothing forcing anyone to buy anything. If people choose to go down the paid route of convenience, that’s the customer’s personal choice. If people are still willing to pay then it makes commercial sense to still charge for the service. If no-one was paying any more, then it would be a good idea to rethink the charging model, but just because there are people saying stuff is too expensive, that’s not a great reason to reduce the price to zero.

Funcom doesn’t need to develop the game any further to be entitled to money for services that provide something. People aren’t paying for expansions, they’re paying for shorter mission cooldowns, more keys, cache keys and the other benefits of being a patron. They are still receiving all of those things regardless of the development of new content. It’s ethically sound, as people are still receiving the service that they are paying for. In other titles, refunds normally happen when the paid for service ceases. For example, they refunded the remaining game time for Wildstar subscribers when they sunset the game. As long as people are getting the service that they pay for, that’s perfectly decent and respectful. It’s the customer’s choice whether or not they want to pay, it’s not unethical of Funcom to charge for it.

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While I 100% agree with you about Funcom rights to keep monetizeing the game as much as they can (it is their property and they can do whatever they want, even charge 1k eur/month to play it) and about the fact that all this matter has nothing to do with business ethics, I still think that the last bit of communications we had and the sudden silence that followed have been border line to misleading.

I have not the time nor the willing to go check what we have been told last, but I seem to remember the (last) new lead developer talking about planning smaller updates in order to have them more often, negating the possibility of porting the missing TSW dungeons/raids into SWL becouse it weas too time consuming, giving little hopes about a story update as well and in general still spreading info and/or rumors about the game developing.
Those last bit of comunications are the reason why some people still think the game will have further developement, while most people recognize that the long silence that followed (coupled with the 12 months bundle offer I would say !) is the clear sign that a decision has been already taken and that we will not see anything new at all in SWL.

That is where Funcom could act more frankly and just officially state that there was no further plan of developing the game.

They did nothing wrong, nothing that was not their right or fraudolent, but still they missed the chance to appear more frank and transparent to their customers, even if that would cost them some incomes.
It is more a matter of costs and revenues and I hope their marketing dep. valued very well if the money they got from it was worth the bad show.

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I agree that the lack of communication from Funcom has been massively disappointing and frustrating. It’d be really nice to know if there is more content coming (ever). It’d help the community a fair bit to know if the game is dead or not, because then we could stop having the same argument ad infinitum.

It’d be great if we had more information to work from, but from a cynical, dispassionate perspective, I can understand why they don’t say anything. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, but it does cost them in customer confidence and good will. Given just how much good will the community has shown in the past, I think it’s particularly disappointing to not get some kind of quid pro quo.

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Actual economists from Milton Fireman on down would probably tell you that this should be a long-term, not a short-term goal. That is, behavior that could seriously damage a company’s reputation with customers should be avoided as it might impeded the long-term ability to generate profits, i.e. sacrifice long-term adherence to the profitability maxim for short term gain.

What happened with SWL was essentially what you’d expect to see when some kind of project manager or executive is violating business ethics by taking steps to ensure they get a short-term bonus with blatant disregard for the long-term impact of their action on the company’s ability to generate revenue. (And they did even that wrong, cf. utter lack of marketing for SWL.)

That’s probably why that market reaction to the SWL release was rather subdued, and why even the Conan Exiles release did not manage to lift the Funcom stock price above early 2017 levels; how could investors be certain that would be anything but short-term hype?

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I’d have more confidence in your position that Funcom hurt their brand if Tencent hadn’t recently bought a big stake at above market price. But evidence seems to be against you.

SWL’s release was better than Funcom had projected. TSW had already suggested it’s a smaller than anticipated niche, so it’s not really a shock that a relaunch didn’t have a massive impact on stock interest.

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What you described here may be wrong business decisions, bad business planning or non efficient business model or whater else but has nothing to do with business ethics, even less with violating them.
The long-term ability of a company to generate revenue impacts the company itself and, of course, its stockholders. It does no harm to anything outside the company world so I fail to see what it could have to do with ethics at all.

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If decisions boosting short-term revenue at the expense of long-term product viability were intentionally made due to a project manager or executive trying to secure (short-term) bonus pay for themselves, that individual would have violated business ethics by acting against the (long-term) interest of the company and its shareholders.

You’re absolutely right of course it may have been bad calls not made by an individual actively disregarding company interests, but just flubbing it. Funcom has not made public any information that would let outsiders gauge which is the case with any reasonable degree of certainty.

No, it’s not. Market reactions indicate the investment did not boost investor confidence in Tencent at all (they kept trending down as though nothing had happened), and did not significantly boost investor confidence in Funcom (needing this big an investment to go back to hovering around the same price as before a late-September slump is not actually a good sign).

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And here’s evidence to why you’re wrong again:

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The relaunch happened in August 2017. You can see the massive dip in stock price, before it went drastically up for 6 months, after which it’s been going down to this day.

I don’t know what made the stock price go up, were there any other game/expansion releases?

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We’re arguing semantics here. I wouldn’t describe the bump and dip in stock price around the SWL launch as “massive”, your “drastic” increase is what I would call massive, which means your evidence actually supports my point.

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April 2018 was when Funcom announced team up with Petroglypn and Conan IP game


Also, Conan Exiles went “gold” on May 2018 :slight_smile:

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Conan Exiles officially released in May 2018, after more than a year of Steam early access. That game created some actual hype during EA and in their 2017 annual report (released April 2018, prior to CE’s official launch) was already the clear focus in terms of which property really generates revenue.

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Does he deal in hot stocks? :v:

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“Make lots of money” is not an ethical action, in and of itself. It’s not an unethical action either. It’s how that money is made that determines whether it’s ethical or not.

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may be its my bad understanding of English language but what you describe is more a violation of employee loyalty/ethics as it is something an employee does against his own company and its shareholders.
Business ethics are more a set of moral rules that concern the relationship between the company that runs the business and the outside world being it its customers, its employees or the natural wildlife or the public health or whatever else that may be impacted by the business itself.

Anyway it is a pointless discussion and it is not worth going further on.

As I have already said they probably made a mistake in cutting us out of any form of communication but I would not go as far as speaking of business ethics violation. It is more of a bad show and only time will tell if they harmed their reputation and if their business will suffer becouse of it.