Didn't anyone say to them "Hey guys, you want profits to go up or at least stabilize."
The fact that Funcom is siphoning off Cash on Hand, this bodes ill for their continued efforts.
Now , of course, the Montreal move is a good measure and will save cash, and a note in the financials about saving on fees for servers and bandwidth down the road (I smell a server merge here) could help.
But, when you bleed subs, and you make no move to advance the game in any manner, shape or form, the horrible feeling you get...you know, that one down in your tummy of gut wrenching horror..sets in on the future of the company and game.
So far, discussion has circulated on the 1.06 update. A doozy for sure...with guild renown, new PvP content and some other changes (like Tier 3...you know, raid content that has not been updated for months and months), is AWOL on the Testlive servers months after the release of 1.05.
Maybe to some this is normal. Hard to say. But, when people start complaining of all the multiple 80's they have and no new content to do, except the last update which added a total of 2-4 hours of stuff ...that becomes a problem, at least to me.
Funcom decides to offer a free return to old players. Why do this when there is nothing major new to do? And then sit on your laurels as you hope they will stick it out for the 1.06 update.
Maybe giving away stuff will help them in this endeavor. Beta invites, free expansion, XP potions...the lot.
How do you make money doing this exactly?
Well, I think Funcom is following the Golden Rule I stated, and think that the money will keep pouring in as they enter "Status Quo".
But, guess what...I think Judas Priest said it best..."You've got another thing coming..."
3 comments:
Haven't physically visited the site in awhile -- RSS laziness -- so pardon my belatedness with "Holy Crap is that banner-image-thing HUGE!!!!"
I haven't kept up on AoC but didn't Funcom drastically reduce the size of the team? If so, doesn't that make it difficult to put out updates on whatever schedule they use?
On that topic, I'm not a fan of scheduled updates. More to the point, I'm not a fan of putting *everything* on that schedule. If there are glaring bugs, just FIX THEM and put the less critical issues into the scheduled update if need be.
Hey
Doesn't that image ROCK!!!??
Anyways, yes, Funcom cut staff by 20%, thus crippling the update schedules.
As well, we are not even asking for a schedule as players.
I would die just once if a patch released with no new bugs to destroy gameplay.
As to your comment about the glaring bugs...this is a main concern in that each patch released by Funcom creates a buttload of a mess, and they must spend the majority of time that would have been used to test the next patch, fixing the patch they just released...
The latest patch had to have no less than 3 hotfixes.
The lessening of staff I think is killing QA on these patches, and when they do not listen to player complaints on the TL servers, all we get is a company dwindling on content and twiddling their thumbs on repairing ongoing issues.
Yet, I still play because I hate all the other MMO's now.
They are probably not pushing particularly much right now for AoC, since probably many people that would be interested are playing Aion now - difficult to compete with the new and shiny.
Personally I am more interested in seeing what might end up with on the non-fantasy side of things. I love the concept behind The Secret World; but I do not trust them to execute it properly.
I would not be surprised if they move more towards casual web-based games besides those announced - it is possibly something their organisation might handle better.
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