Funcom half-yearly 2019 financials

Mark the date in your calendars https://investors.funcom.com/presentation-of-second-quarter-half-yearly-2019-financials/

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Bah, it’ll be more of the usual damage control / vacuous statements that could mean everything and nothing.

Secret World Legends

We had a successful 2nd Year anniversary and will be providing continuous server restarts as an ongoing attempt to prevent the game from destroying itself.

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It’s starting now

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Ho boy, when they discussed the games in development and came to the slide with Moons of Madness and Conan Chop Chop (13:03) they didn’t even mentioned once that MoM is supposed to be a Secret World game. How’s that for confidence in the franchise?

Another gem I found very amusing was

We don’t want to squeeze the games out, we want to give them the attention they deserve. (@16:54)

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If you check the PDFs for the financial report, you will see that SWL doesn’t even warrant a separate mention there. It is lumped together with their other MMORPGs, Age of Conan and Anarchy Online and they aren’t even mentioned by name when it comes to planned activities for 2019.
That’s how much Funcom is investing in those games, and that is how much interesting stuff they have planned for those games in the near future - very little.

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It’s ok
Have you seen the huge dog surrounded by loads of other dogs in Agartha?
It’s far more entertaining.

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Old games are dying? Better make 6 new ones!

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That would just be common sense, bright lad :v:

That shows lack of commitment, which I’m not a fan of

But hey, don’t worry about that and buy the 1-year patron!

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I can’t say that I’m completely surprised by the absence of longer-term plans for SWL in the financial report. Although I would have expected a crossover promotion between SWL and Moons of Madness to be announced.

I am, however, concerned that Funcom’s commitment to the “declining online games” went from launching “events and content releases to spur periods of growth” (Q1 report) to absolutely nothing.

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If the game that they were talking about was The Secret World, and they considered it an older game that didn’t merit much attention now after seven years or whatnot, I would understand that. But this is Secret World Legends, which was launched two years ago. Giving up on a game after two years seems premature to me.

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A cynic might think they’d given up on it before it even relaunched.

The trend of slowly declining revenues on the current Live Game portfolio is expected
to continue as in previous quarters due to the ageing of the games. The relaunch of
The Secret World might temporarily have a positive impact on this trend short term.
The Company will continue to support the current Live Games as long as they continue
to contribute positively to the Company’s results.

Source: http://cdn.funcom.com/investor/2017/Funcom_4Q16_Report.pdf

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Well, at least it’s not Tabula Rasa. Then again, at least that game was spared the indignity of a perpetual life support stage, so maybe it’s more like unfortunately SWL isn’t Tabula Rasa.

The most telling remark regarding Secret World Legends, besides the silence given to it in the financial report, is on the status of the work from the North Carolina studio:

The Co-op shooter continues to have the focus of the US studio as we consider that segment of online games to have potential for the Company moving forward.

It’s long been evident that Secret World Legends hasn’t been getting anything but the minimum support for nearly five months. It’d be disingenuous for anyone paying attention to think there will be a return of significant support when the US studio has been working on a new live service game that has been its focus for longer than we can know and could only mean, by virtue of the nature of the project, that the studio will place most of its efforts into supporting it this day forward. Whatever potential that Secret World Legends had of generating widespread interest had been exhausted once the South Africa update failed to garner the returns it needed to justify further investment.

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There are rumors around saying that the whole SWL staff at the moment is composed by … Andy !
I don’t want to spread false rumors but that would go perfectly with what you are saying and I find it very credible.
From a different POV it is exactly what I would do if a branch of my company would run into troubles and I could not foresee a solution : reduce the expenses to a minimum and keep running it only until it wont cause losses.

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As game companies are bled dry by f2p gamers…and with f2p gamers exhausting game resources across the board there will be a day soon that f2p gamers will be left at the front door.

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Is “free to play” the same thing as what Funcom referred to in the presentation as “game as service”? If so, it seems as though FC is basing a lot of its business model on this kind of thing.

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Doubtful. Games as a service covers subscription and free to play models. It’s basically any game where there will be further development that will be released. Even stuff where it’s basically just providing a server hosting service is considered a GaaS. It’s basically anything where there’s an opportunity to charge for something after the initial release (DLC for example).

Free to play just means that there’s no monthly charge for access. Most F2P games include some form of microtransaction options - so SWL has aurum purchasing for example.
F2P isn’t necessarily a bad way to make money - Fortnite is F2P for example, and they’re raking it in!

After they announced SA too early, which if anything damaged its rep, anything they are doing probably won’t get mentioned until late on in its creation.

A novel cache would be nice though.