Where the Magic funcom?

[Skinny]

I know it’s neither greed nor laziness/malice/indifference.

Then what is it?

Knowing that:

Funcom recoups Conan Exiles development costs in first week

And knowing that it sales grew to 1.6 - 1.7 Million copies. So for me, it does sound like greed/malice. We have paid Funcom for CE, Funcom is using it as a crowdfunding for their new projects instead of investing it further in the development of CE, while it is their money and they have the right to do that, it does not come across as being right. It will surely come back and haunt them, a reputation can be broken very quickly, however it cannot be regained quickly. If they do not even allocate the resources to fix the most simple things like setting the right values in the right tables, how can we expect them to have the resources allocated to fix the complex issues? People who say that Funcom is releasing DLC to fund the ongoing development are Hypocrites -> My personal opinion.

[Mikey]

@Skinny

Then what is it?

It’s this:

@Skinny

while it is their money and they have the right to do that

Considering that we are getting new features and bug fixes for CE. If they’d totally abandoned it by now, you might have a point.

@Skinny

People who say that Funcom is releasing DLC to fund the ongoing development are Hypocrites -> My personal opinion.

Well that’s certainly your right. We might also be called realists. Game productions cannot run like “recouped our costs, now everything is great!”. If they do, they’ll break their back, sooner or later. And do bear in mind that while there’s been further sales since that article, there’s also been further costs. In the end, Funcom’s economy is their business (well their shareholders’, anyway). As you say, it’s their money.

As I will often point out, it’s been (a bit more than) a year and a half since EA launch. Since that time, some bugs are somehow, mindbogglingly still present. Many others have been squashed. New ones have been introduced. It’s a mixed bag, and I’m certainly no fanboy. But I’m not a hater, either - rather somewhere in between. But there’s certainly been continued development on the game, also after “real” launch.

We’ve also gotten a bunch of new features, I don’t want to enumerate them as I’m sure you’re aware of them. I am as disappointed as anyone in the state of AI and city life, one of the features I was looking forward the most. Its cancellation made me give up the game in disgust for a LONG time. Sorcery can come or not, I’m kinda meh on that one.

What I’m saying is, I don’t begrudge Funcom adding some (largely cosmetic) DLC, that we can buy or not buy as we please, and if it helps keep Conan Exiles financially interesting, leading to more stuff to play with, I’m all for that. But I do bloody want my bugfixes, too, and I haven’t quite given up on getting those: but I do certainly think it would be nice for some serious progress (not promises) on that, before we see more new features, whether paid or not.

[Skinny]

If they’d totally abandoned it by now, you might have a point.

For me, it feels just like that. They have some people working on it, a handful maybe, but not nearly enough to get into an acceptable state.

Game productions cannot run like “recouped our costs, now everything is great!”. If they do, they’ll break their back, sooner or later. And do bear in mind that while there’s been further sales since that article, there’s also been further costs.

I totally agree on that in essence, but the further costs are surely much less compared to the initial development cost. When the game has generated 6 times the development cost and you reinvest only a tiny bit of it back into the game(Not even mentioning new things but rather fixing the existing stuff) it comes across as greed to me. Again, this is my opinion and I do have much respect for yours, like you said, you are neither a fanboy nor a hater.

[Lady_Bonecold]

So where the promised Magic?

[Lady_Bonecold]

If you’re game makes up the entire development cost. The smart choice would be to focus on that game. You would think a development team would improve and focus on a hit game in less than two weeks. Seems the company is greedy and Lazy. So we the preorders and buyers should pay them to make another game? I say no. Fix the bugs and glitches. I paid for a product. I want what was promised to me at E3. DLC is basically funding Conan Exiles now. They already spent development cost or future promised updates on making a new game.Feels like assassin creed. Forget the old and run to the next game. Full Price for half finish game. >:(

[Bodin]

@Lady_Bonecold

So where the promised Magic?

Well, it was done. Then they started the final test and cast invisibility. It worked great! But now they can’t find the update.

[Skinny]

The QA team took it with them when they left Funcom

[Jens_Erik]

I wanted to jump into this thread and address some of the things that have been brought up in the discussion

First off, thank you for all your input and for sharing your opinions. I completely understand that it’s frustrating to not know anything definitive about such a hot topic as sorcery so hopefully I’ll be able to clear some things up.

To put it bluntly: Magic is still up in the air. Right now our current focus is finishing and releasing the three remaining dungeons that were on our roadmap. Sorcery is very, very early, and we don’t even know what it might look like or if it will be implemented at this point.

Finally, I wanted to clear up some of the things that was brought up regarding the money we’ve made and spent on Conan Exiles.

Conan Exiles made back it’s initial development cost during its first week in sales. However, that doesn’t mean that all the money made after that is pure profit, nor that all of it is funneled back into Exiles.

Some of the money was put into Conan Exiles when we saw that it was a success, meaning we extended the development time and were able to hire more people. More money put into a project doesn’t necessarily mean that bugs will be fixed faster.

We’re a company with over 100 employees, split across 2 studios, all of whom need to earn a livable wage, and about half of them are working on Secret World Legends, Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, or the upcoming game being made in our Durham studio (Exiles was made in Oslo, at a different studio). If Conan Exiles was our only game things would be different, but we want to maintain SWL, AoC and AO as well.

Even though the discussion has been civil and friendly I do feel like it’s gone off-topic from its original intent and so I’m going to lock it. I should also add that none of us can’t go into further details about Funcom’s financials in a public forum such as this.