The New Launcher and Communication

EDIT: I’m in error, as I’m sure people have pointed out in the replies. Read through the pinned post regarding the launcher in General Discussion for Funcom’s information.

I’ll leave the post below unchanged for transparency’s sake. Feel free to call me dumb if you want, I earned it.

I suppose this is specifically addressed to Funcom, or rather to whoever at Funcom is directing the company’s current trajectory.

Today, I and many others have booted up Conan Exiles to find a small update and the imposition of a new launcher. It was somewhat of a surprise, given that, at least to my knowledge, there was no forewarning of such a thing on the horizon. I made sure to read through the change notes for 2.3 and 2.3.1 before starting this, in addition to trying to recall anything from the latest Developer Stream.

The launcher, to its credit, seems to provide ease-of-use improvements with mod management, but I really doubt that was the main intent in including it.

I have to ask then, why? I have to ask that because you decided not to tell us. What, did you just expect that no one would notice and just go about their day as if nothing was different?

I’m sure I don’t need to lecture anyone on it, but communication skills are very important. It helps to cultivate understanding, respect, and trust between the two or more parties involved. When you spring unannounced or undocumented changes on the userbase, you are not exercising those skills in any capacity. And given the negative sentiment towards the influx of game launchers in recent years, it gives the impression that it was a deliberate attempt to avoid negative feedback. Unfortunately for you, that feedback is still on its way, and perhaps even more fervent and volatile now due to your reluctance to tell us.

As I understand it, Conan Exiles is rated as an 18+ game, which means that, despite some people’s behavior in various forums, we should all be adults, able to handle things that we don’t want to hear. Do you trust us to be adults, or are we simply one step above animals, not fit to be told?

For all I know, the inclusion of this launcher could be the foreshadowing for supporting cross-play between Steam and Epic Games users, as I suspect the imposition of Funcom Live Services was also intended for back in June of 2020. But I don’t know that.

Tell us.

For those of you who are wondering, yes you can circumvent the new Funcom Launcher (for now), although the solution is a bit hidden-away. Navigate to:

Steam\steamapps\common\Conan Exiles\ConanSandbox\Binaries\Win64

and make a shortcut for either ConanSandbox.exe or ConanSandbox_BE.exe, depending obviously on whether you need BattlEye or not. NOTE: The ConanSandbox.exe found in the main CE folder will not work.

In addition, I would ask that anyone who comments on this to be as civil as you can. The first step in being respected is to prove that you can offer it in return.

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I mean meh it doesn’t bother me that much. Like think about it, is it really that much of a big deal? You gotta press one extra button now to launch the game, oh boy what a nightmare. My thoughts when i first saw it though is they using the popularity of conan exiles to advertise their other games. Its like hey look at all these other cool games we have please try them out / buy them. Idk which is their most successful game but i prefer conan exiles and wish more dev power went behind it :confused:

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Were you around the first time they introduced the launcher? There was a whole bunch of negative reactions back then, enough that they decided to roll it back and say that they needed to work on it more before releasing it. I guess this is the release they alluded to.

For my part, I disliked it back then and dislike it now for the exact same reason: don’t make me launch a launcher from a launcher, so I can launch the game from the launcher I launched from a launcher :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Steam is my launcher for the games in my Steam library. When I open Steam, select a specific game, and press the “Play” button, it’s because I want to play that game.

I don’t have anything against Funcom Launcher per se. It looks okay, seems functional, brings some nice QoL features, and has a relatively small footprint in memory, much smaller than Steam. In fact, I would love to bypass Steam completely1 and just use Funcom Launcher for Conan Exiles. But this thing where you launch Funcom Launcher from Steam? It’s annoying as hell.

I agree 100% that Funcom really needs to improve their communication, but I’m tired of banging on the same drum. It’s a textbook definition of a Sisyphean task: we go on forums and complain about the communication, Funcom acknowledges us and promises to improve, we get better communication for a while, and then things go back to the bad old days of chaotic silence. :man_shrugging:


1 To anyone thinking of giving me instructions on how to make a Windows shortcut for the Funcom Launcher: don’t bother, I know how to do it, and you’re missing my point :wink:

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They probably didn’t announce it because posts like this exist.

Scenario One: Announce it, people complain, people conjecture about all the problems it will cause, people conjecture about what it might mean.

Scenario Two: Don’t announce it, people complain when it launches, people complain about not being told, people conjecture about what it might mean.

The advantage for scenario two is that, instead of reading complaint posts for 2 weeks before the launch and after, we only have to read them for two weeks after.

And in the time it takes people to create and post a thread about it, or for anyone to read the thread, they could have started the launcher and clicked “Continue” about 25 times.

Fine, since you insisted, I’ll help. Hit that Windows button on your keyboard, type in conanexiles_org/exe.steamapps/broken.com:unlaunchlauncherlunchbox then hit shift. Pin that to your taskbar and give me gold.

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This seems like a very small problem to me, not one worth being agitated about.

Posted nearly a month ago, read the original post in it’s entirety.

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Thanks for the link. I missed that because I don’t follow TestLive as closely as live. Would it have been nicer to have an announcement in the announcements forum? Yes, it would, but at least it’s not like they didn’t say anything anywhere.

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Hey all,

Please send us any feedback regarding the launcher as well as bugs or issues found while using it on this thread below:

Thank you in advance. :slight_smile:

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