No, I’m not “privy” to something you all aren’t. Funcom did an interview session with the Cursed Lands Discord in April of 2020 (which they did the year prior to that as well). When I found out, an admin for the Cursed Lands sent me a recording of the Q/A, and I wrote a summary for (and is public) in which Scott said they plan on investing into Conan for a long while still.
Here is how I summarized it at the time.
- What does the company see as the future of Conan Exiles?
Scott started off with saying that they have been working on Conan Exiles for close to 5 years total now. They plan on continuing to work on Conan Exiles for several more years. The three biggest events for Conan Exiles in terms of player impact was the first EA launch of Conan Exiles, retail launch (May 8th, 2018), and the launch of mounts in December of 2019.
Conan Exiles had its third highest population overall (using internal metric data) with the mount launch. With Covid-19, they are also seeing high numbers from that as well. Conan Exiles is very healthy, Scott says, and they intend to continue working on it for a long time.
Side Note: What I wrote was accurate, at the time. The early access release of The Isle of Siptah later surpassed the launch of mounts for total player count.
Full write up is here. The part I snipped out is at the very bottom.
You are welcome to doubt me if you so choose (as admittingly, the recording wasn’t posted anywhere public that I’m aware of, but their were well north of 100 people during the discord event, and I’m probably under valuing those numbers just because I don’t remember those details). But due note that I work very hard to ensure the summaries I’ve written are as close to 100% to what was said during a stream (or in this case, Q/A on the discord server) as I humanly am able to.
Could something happen where they sped up their time table and said, alright, we done with Conan now? Sure, but I have seen zero evidence to suggest their goals for the length of development has changed.
Sure, and as I said, someday that will happen. They aren’t going to develop Conan forever (nor should they be expected to). Modding availability won’t be the cause though. We already know Dune is a thing. We also know the acquisition of Tencent created a huge spike in employment over in FC land. Their CEO said, I believe it was in their very last financial stream if I remember right, that they were going to expand their original goals of Dune, and focus more into Conan due to the Tencent acquisition. They even shelved a couple projects they were working on for those reasons, so they could devote more of the resources to Conan/Dune.
So yes, someday they are going to move on from Conan. There is no evidence to suggest that “modding” will speed up that process however, or be a catalyst. I do know that several of their developers have stated their admiration (publicly) and encouragement to mod authors. Robtheswede, as he’s known by in many of my past dev stream summaries, has been an advocate for mod authors for years. It wasn’t a recent thing. More accurately is that they see the value in modding, and they want to support their mod authors and finally have the resources to do so properly.
Whenever they stop developing Conan, modding will surely help extend the life of Conan for it’s players. And yes, it will bring in some dollars here and there when new players are interested in diving in. I fail to see the evil in that. Thousands of games are no longer in development, without any modding, and continue to see purchases for many (many) years.