I don’t mind paying for new content whether its 50 or 100 USD. I don’t even mind paying a monthly subscription fee. I know the game is in maintenance mode and we will not see new content ever again, but I’m still hoping that funcom realizes one day that they’re are literally sitting on a goldmine.
I would happily open a monthly subscription on TSW. In fact, if they were to go back to supporting it again, I wouldn’t hesitate to create a new account alongside my main Grandmaster account and do just that. But spend money on SWL? Not on your life.
1 Like
This project still has fans who would gladly help it profit and succeed for the most important reason.
The story.
2 Likes
If it was a funding issue, can the community help fund further development? Because from what I’ve been seeing, everyone is willing to pay over a 100 bucks just to see new content, I mean can this actually happen?
2 Likes
It’s unlikely it would work as simply as that.
Depending on how much content needs to be created, you’re looking at multiple developers spending a fair bit of time working on something which for Funcom has limited return. Those developers will already be working on other stuff for Funcom already, which would mean taking them off of projects like Dune, and that wouldn’t be something that the studio execs would support, because the potential revenue of that will be getting a lot of focus.
Even changing existing stuff would be a lot of work. The likely reason that we don’t have all of the dungeons as elites is that they need more work hours than the studio’s been willing to sign off on. Sadly, it’s not as simple as changing a few values on a sheet to create new tiers, (I’m not suggesting anyone is saying this btw, just it’d be nice if it was that easy).
Going through the code to hunt down all the weird interactions that never mattered before would be a pretty hefty task, and may then lead to a domino effect of things which have to then be altered, (some people may remember that AEGIS in TSW broke the gear manager, even though the two weren’t connected, or so it was initially thought). That makes it a risky process to change things, as setting a concrete timetable for completion could really easily slip and lead to even further costs.
2 Likes
But there’s some corporate dumbness at work here, too. Funcom could easily re-charge fandom-wide interest in playing and paying money for this game if they simply announced that new content WAS verifiably coming and shared some previews now and again to keep our appetite whetted. That’s a strategy that has worked for Blizzard for over 20 years. The absolute radio silence from Funcom devs re: SWL creates an attitude of abandonment and disinterest that discourages people from playing and depresses both the playerbase and potential profits.
Just announce that content IS definitely coming (ETA: ‘soon,’ whatever), set a price point expectation (50 dollars for Congo, 50 dollars for the missing Elite dungeon/raid content and some new gear tiers, progression options, some better rewards for Patron subscribers – 5 cache keys per day, a small MoF allowance, something along those lines), and they could easily pull back in hundreds of players who sadly drifted away thinking there was never going to be any more to the game that they’ve loved for a decade. That would help offset the cost of allocating those development resources. That’s basic game development financing.
The refusal to make even the slightest move towards community retention is just dumb. These aren’t people you’re going to convince to play Dune after spending a decade disappointing them with lack of content for their favorite game and killing it off out of sheer neglect–with a whimper instead of a bang. Funcom’s reputation among Secret World gamers is worse than Netflix’s among fans of fantasy series. Your only chance to retain these customers is to give them what they’ve been wanting since 2020: more Secret World content–even if it’s just a final content update to finish off the storyline and give the game a proper send-off into the sunset. Otherwise, you’re just uninviting a long term fandom from being your paying customers any longer by making it seem that you don’t CARE whether they keep spending money on your games, you’re never gonna give them any more attention. Nothing about that makes any financial sense.
1 Like
The big problem is that the fandom isn’t very big. TSW massively underperformed. SWL’s population has never been huge. There have certainly been more people playing in the past, but would a new release schedule create enough impact to be significant? That’s a trickier call.
TSW’s financial model showed that there wasn’t enough of a fan base for individually priced content packs to be worthwhile for Funcom. Increasing the price up to $50 would also potentially drive away potential customers - I love the ip dearly, but I would not even consider buying a single zone for that much. Remembering the backlash about how empty South Africa felt, it’s hard to imagine how much worse that would have been if people had paid that much for it. And if you’re going to create something which feels like it gives good value for the money, that’d be a LOT of development requirements. The quality of the writing and the story has always been one of the strongest aspects of the ip. Unfortunately, it’s also true that it’s content which is devoured very quickly, and has limited impact in terms of replayability.
The potential negative impact of putting a paywall at the end of the game, locking off new content would risk alienating a portion of an already small community. Back in TSW when issue 12 was needed to play MF & MFB, there were plenty of people who were not happy to have new dungeons paywalled. It’s unlikely to help long term retention much.
The concept of new content reinvigorating the game is also questionable. What we often see in other games with regular content releases is that players come back for the new stuff, but then stop logging in once they’ve experienced it. There would need to be big changes to encourage the average population back to the game for long periods, and once again, that’s going to come with a hefty bill in terms of developer time. Even when there was an advertised roadmap for SWL content, it didn’t really have a positive impact. Instead, it was used as a focus for people complaining about the rate of development. It didn’t make people happy and content to stick around, knowing that stuff was in the pipeline, it just ended up with people getting grumpy that the schedule wasn’t being kept to, wasn’t ambitious enough, etc.
The idea that Funcom could attract hundreds of players back to the game sounds great from a player perspective. For Funcom, it’s much less impressive. Looking at Conan Exiles Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations (mmo-population.com), CExiles has an estimated daily player count of over 122 thousand players. In terms of priorities, that makes an hour of development time spent on CE far more profitable than spending it on SWL.
Funcom is unlikely to easily win back the hearts of many gamers who felt the company let them down with TSW/SWL. They’ve done more than they might have, (I’m still surprised that the TSW servers are still going and haven’t been shut down,) but I doubt many people would be willing to forgive and forget because they released Congo and dungeons that people felt should have been in the game from release.
Honestly, I’d be thrilled if they put in more dev time for SWL. It may happen, I know that when they were working on the rebalance patch, there was plenty that the devs had in mind about what they’d like to do and ideas of what was possible (apparently changing the last fight in Ankh was very much not possible without rebuilding it from the ground up). Funcom does at least have a track record for keeping game servers on (how old is Anarchy now?) rather than just sunsetting games that underperform, but when you’re talking about games with populations in their hundreds vs hundreds of thousands, you can’t expect a commercial company to prioritise the smaller franchise. With Dune on its way, Funcom’s probably hoping that will dwarf CE, which would be great for them. Maybe they’d then have the time to look at the SW ip and do more with it - it took Guild Wars 7 years to get a sequel, maybe SWL 2 will happen in the future /shrug
3 Likes
I would pay 5 50’s for more TSW/SWL content.
It’s the only intellectually stimulating game out there with a one of a kind story.
That’s what saddens me, letting a gem like this drift into oblivion.
1 Like
I’d pay $100 for any new SWL expansion.
2 Likes
I would pay five 50’s.
I don’t have a problem with paying for expansions. I would pay 50 euros for Congo. I doubt it would cost that much though. Depends how big it is I guess.
As others have said, maybe it’s not financially worth doing for the company. I do wonder if it’s worth crowd funding on Kickstarter, not sure how many players there are at the moment, or how many there were at it’s highest. The game seems unique to me, and it’s very, very good, are there any other games like this? If so I want to know what they are so that I can play them. It deserves to be continued.
2 Likes
Do you love to join the iLLUMINATI brotherhood where you re entitled to $999,000 as new membership benefits…If interested kindly signify ‘INTERESTED’ to start your membership journey.
Hail the Light 
Its free to play innit so there would be no charge and there is no money being put in to this game except the money that is paid to them by patronage or shop purchase - and THATS the money they should have used to upload congo to the server since there WAS and still is a paying public of a community who WANT it and were PROMISED it too by in game dialogue and as many hints of it coming along with comments such as “new content added on a regular basis” during the time of SA. They are a massive company now owned by tencent and its not like they are short of money is it now.
Or you can take this line “Making a new zone would stall releases for quite some time and thats not something we want to do” for what it really seems to mean which is “No - there is no congo” or they are in fact still working on congo even tho they have no staff - TAKE YOUR PICK 
It can only mean one or t’other!
WOULD YOU PAY FOR CONGO?
I think we already did.
50 is kind of stiff. I would definitely pay 25-30 US dollars tho (sorry, I’m 'Murican)
I feel like the development costs will be raised through crowdfunding.
Developer motivation is another story.
I’ll pay more than 50 euros if they add the Augment and Aegis systems to SWL.
And auxiliary weapons too.
The only thing remotely reasonable would be to make a proper Sequel and let it start in Congo. I would pay 50$/€ for a Congo DLC, probably, but I don’t think it would do much for the game.