f13.net forums - Age of Conan delayed, stock takes big hit

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July 13, 2025, 08:34:29 AM

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Does WAR and AoC releases dates affect each other?

You forgot an option: "I'll get whichever one comes out first".

Edit: Oh, and how about a "I never buy MMO games on their release date."

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At this point, does WAR and AoC releases dates weither you buy them?

:-D

And yah, needs more options. Then again, what fun is a poll with a bunch with too large of a voting spread? I would have gone with, "Both, but I have reservations on Funcom's ability to not suck."

I expect to be in the "I'll beta test both for free and buy whichever one I like." group. Which seems to be missing as an option. There is a possibility that I will be in the, "Wait a month or more after launch and pick up the one that sucks least at that time." group if I don't get into the betas and which is also missing as an option.

Where is the "How the hell do I know, they are both still in deep beta!" option?

I was a very happy AO player for quite a while starting a year or two after the disaster launch. I thought the game was fun. It was well managed. And the company really seemed to understand their players.

However, while they have ground out some pretty decent expansions, they haven't been on time, they've had big parts missing at release. The latest one was, I think, a year late?

Their ability to run a quirky interesting and high quality niche game I'm completely convinced of. And that's what Conan could be really. Their ability to manage a full A-Class mainstream release? Including a console edition? That's not really plausable to me. And based on their past behavior, I would interpret a push on the release as meaning they're utterly lost and grasping for more time rather than they're right on top of things and need to polish it to perfection.

They just got more venture capital last month. They're spending it wisely. It's not a bad thing.

Why does the title say pushback? Release dates given before mass invites to closed beta are largely imaginary and in general are probably made up via rolling dice.

Finally, a use for the d30.

I am oh so weak willed when it comes to MMOGs. Ill buy both of them.

The poll is confusing, how many that voted "get both" would still have gotten both if they launched at relatively the same time?
I'm looking forward to AoC far more than I am WAR, but now that theres a nice gap in between launches, I'll end up playing both.
I still voted for "I'll play WAR if I can't play AoC"

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At this point, does WAR and AoC releases dates weither you buy them?

WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN

Okay, yeah, I'll buy both.

I thought the date slipping was expected, but Funcom stock got fucking creamed today, down 15NOK to 20NOK or 57%. As was said above, since they just got new funding the stock reaction is stupid. They are only going to make the game better. That kind of share price decline would happen if the company's financial viability was in doubt due to the delay, but it isn't.

Maybe they had that new cash infusion sitting in nice, safe mortgage-backed hedge funds tongue

Quote from: Nonentity on August 10, 2007, 11:40:38 AM

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At this point, does WAR and AoC releases dates weither you buy them?

WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN

Okay, yeah, I'll buy both.

How's that?

The closer they launch the worse for AoC imho. Doesn't affect me until beta tho

And posting from cell keypad sucks. I blink faster than i can find these stupid keys...

Quote from: shiznitz on August 10, 2007, 11:49:10 AM

Hmm I pay like no attention to release dates so I've no clue what they were listed at before. Looking at EBGames though the Xbox 360 version has slipped beyond Xmas. If it was supposed to release before Xmas then that would explain things probably. Anyone who is so monumentally stupid that they'd buy Funcom stock is likely to see this as a big problem.

Probably there is some fear the PC version will slip past Xmas too. It doesn't really matter for an MMO but that doesn't mean stock investors know it doesn't matter.

The stock dip isn't unexpected, their investors have a six month delay in the returns on their investments. Although 42.5% is one hell of a dip.

I mightl buy one that gets better independent reviews few months after release. My guild going to ether of them will increase my likelihood of playing it.

AoC PvP sounds better on paper so I am leaning toward that, but I will buy whichever one comes out first because I am in MMO limbo at the moment. I am glad they decided to give AoC more time because I was worried that Funcom was going to pull an AO launch, they still might, but the odds of that have at least gone down.

Just wrote a couple of posts on this over at Q23, but figured this place would be even more interested in some of this stuff.

According to Norwegian finance newspaper Dagens Næringsliv, Funcom's owners lost over $120 million dollars as Funcom shares plummeted 47,8 per cent upon the announcement that Age of Conan will be delayed. While there's no new launch date, this means AoC might have to compete not just with WoW/TBC but also Warhammer Online, Wrath of the Lich King and whatever other major MMOs might be scheduled for release in the near future. Earlier this summer, Funcom received as much as $30 million dollars in funding from various investors. According to analyst Espen Torgersen of Carniege, Funcom's credibility is at an all-time low, and that the only way they can pull through this is by releasing the game as soon as possible and make sure the launch is successful (no shit, Sherlock). According to product manager Erling Ellingsen (who used to write for the same games site I used to write for, fact freaks), they've pushed the title back because beta testers identified some areas which needed improving if the game were to match other competitors in the market.

Funcom head honcho, Trond Arne Aas, who owns 3% of the company's shares, does not comment much, but says that he's been running from meeting to meeting with other owners and investors, and that they're all mighty pissed off. Investors bought Funcom shares at 38,12NOK (approximately $6,57) a piece earlier this summer. As of yesterday, Funcom's shares were worth 20,10NOK (or $3,45).

Ouch.

I'm a bit curious how this is going to end. I remember AO, The Longest Journey and Dreamfall as mediocre-to-poor games. One of the much-vaunted features of Conan is the combat system, but as far as I know Funcom has never made a combat-oriented game. Unless you count the "combat system" in Dreamfall, which was an utter sack of shit.

There's a lot of good people working on Conan (some of their concept artists are simply marvellous, for instance), but I get the feeling their management and some of their senior creatives are ... lacking. Ragnar Tørnquist, the "creative mastermind" behind The Longest Journey, Dreamfall and Anarchy Online, is little more than a hack. The plot and dialogue in both TLJ and DF is dreadful (even though their settings are relatively inspired, although part of that could easily be attributed to the concept artists), and his Anarchy Online book is fucking terrible. I don't know whether he's involved with this or not, but if he is ... well, it doesn't count in favour of poor Conan. Also, if Funcom's management has been willing to hedge the future of the company on Tørnquist's imagination not once or twice but three times, I'd wager they've got quite a lot of confidence in the man. I'd be outright surprised if he wasn't involved with this at a pretty senior level. It also says a lot about the decision making ability of the management.

We'll see. I'm just a little bit worried by the recent development, and I wonder what they're going to do about their potential competition. WoW is obviously bigger than Conan, and even though Warhammer is just as smelly and nerdy as Conan, it's got a much more experienced team behind it, a much more powerful marketing machinery and a more lucrative license. Who reads Conan? Who cares about Conan? I might be out of the loop, but I don't know anyone who likes Conan. Most people think the property is ridiculous.

My prediction? Funcom is going down, down, down. They've had it coming for some time, and unless they manage to handle this fiasco in a very graceful manner, they're not just fucked, they're Houston 500 fucked. They don't have massive amounts of cash stashed away, they don't have Blizzard's reputation (or bank account, or, in fact, anything Blizzard has) and they don't have an EA-sized publisher backing their product. They've got Eidos.

Once again, ouch.

Oops. I suppose I should've looked around some more. cry

Well, um, so ... nothing new here, I guess? None of my numbers juicy enough for ya?

I'll try harder next time.

The bad thing here is what happens to AoTC if Funcom's investors are screaming at them to go live. I don't think they should worry about Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King. If AoTC is good, original, a relief from the MMOG blah-blah, then I think it'll do well even if it's competing with other product.

If they pee in their pants and go live with a game as broken and unfinished as AO was at launch, they're fucking toast. They probably already have a segment of the market that won't play anything they put out as a result of the reputational hit of the AO launch. They need to have a technically solid launch AND they need to have some of the systems they've promised that will distinguish Conan from other MMOGs. If they do what Turbine did with Lord of the Rings and basically just push a vanilla WoW-ish design out with a few little tweaks and twists in a commercial environment where WoW and Warhammer are giving them competition, they're also fucking toast.

Crunch time, Funcom. You have to sail between Scylla and Charybdis here, and god help you if your grip on the tiller slackens.

If investors are upset that an MMO is delayed, they obviously know nothing about what they are investing in.

Well, if you believe in Funcom and AoC now seems like a good time to get a deal on some stock... evil

Quote from: SHDR on August 11, 2007, 11:34:52 AM

Oops. I suppose I should've looked around some more. cry

Well, um, so ... nothing new here, I guess? None of my numbers juicy enough for ya?

I'll try harder next time.

Yah. It was only about 3-4 posts down.

Quote from: SHDR on August 11, 2007, 11:26:08 AM

Ragnar Tørnquist, the "creative mastermind" behind The Longest Journey, Dreamfall and Anarchy Online, is little more than a hack.

Bullshit. While I haven't read the Anarchy Online novel, I'm a big fan of his videogame creative work and so are many other people. His stories have always been a cut above the outrageously tacky, poorly written, campy lore that many gamers elevate to obsessions (hi Star Wars and WarCraft lore fans). His work gives me hope for actual creative types in an industry where storylines often fall flat because they're just from a programmer exercising the other side of his/her brain.

Anarchy Online has a great ominous atmosphere that makes me return to it at times, wishing it was a better game. Yes it had the art and music, but they were the realisation of Tørnquist's dark sci-fi milieu. I still think AO set the scene for the player better than any other MMOG ever, even if the game doesn't pull it off: ftp://ftp.funcom.com/cd/intro.exe (yes an exe - it's a self-playing Bink video)

It's safer to presume all upcoming MMOGs will suck. Very few ever prove otherwise. Certainly not sensible to "pick" a game now - see Vanguard community.

That AO video still rocks after all these years. I quote Tale in full.

Quote from: Rasix on August 11, 2007, 04:09:20 PM

Thread merged.

Opposite day for you?

Depends if I get to Beta one or both, and see what the games are like. If I don't get to Beta (or open Beta) one or both then I'll follow feedback from the F13 crowd on the games for a month or two as the NDAs drop and the games go into retail. Release dates don't mean much to me, as long as the two don't release at once, and have similar positive F13 feedback, in which case I'd lean towards Warhamster since I've been a player for years, and know little about Conan.

These AoC threads are a mess. Unfortunately this is the one that got indexed by Google for "funcom" and "stock" (result #7) so I'm going to rearrange things to fit that.