AoC - 400.000 players (27.05.08)

[KallDrexx]

I wonder which business school teaches that "keeping the lights on" is success.

By that logic the Microsoft's and Sony's consoles weren't a success and should have cut them because they haven't made back their initial investment yet after 2+ years.

I doubt any MMO that isn't WoW made back their initial investment in the first month, instead it's a business model that's meant to build up loyalty and revenue over time, where soon enough their month to month profits will exceed what was originally put into the game. 

Also remember, just because they claim ti took 40 million to make AoC doesn't mean that it was $40mil of funcom's money.  Publishers usually (on non-mmos at least) pay the development house for the rights to sell the game

[Murgos]

You people are strange.  As long as the business makes enough money to service their debt and pay their expenses it's a success.  It's that simple.  Some of the most successful businesses in the world have done just that plus a couple of percent a year (not even that for non-profits) for generations.

They don't need to pay back 40 mil the day after the product launches, they don't need 100% returns yearly or any other such nonsense.

[tazelbain]

Its about investors not creditors.  Creditors are just happy you pay off your loans.  But Investers are going want to return on their investment to justify the high-risk endevor like an MMO rather than do something safer with the money.

Anyway, I am not trying to doomcast AoC. I am just trying to say that just because company doesn't shutter the servers mean that game is success.  In regards to AoC, they have a solid start.

[Venkman]

By that logic the Microsoft's and Sony's consoles weren't a success and should have cut them because they haven't made back their initial investment yet after 2+ years.

Funny you should say that... by themselves many consoles don't make their costs back. But they're good longterm investments for the companies because of the residuals.

Which is the case for MMOs. Yea, it's nice if you can recoup your upfront investment from box sales alone. But I would imagine that has not been common in recent years. And really, not doing so merely means you're amortizing the investment over a longer period of monthly subscriptions. So you account for that when assessing team size and resources for the Live game.

[Hellinar]

I wonder which business school teaches that "keeping the lights on" is success.

 I'm wondering which universities teach that getting a good job doing what you trained for is a success? Most of them I think. For most of the people at Funcom, keeping the lights on, paychecks rolling, and customers happy is a success. You are confusing "a good investment" with "a successful game".

Even if only a fraction of MMOGs pay off big as an investment, that will keep the investors investing. Provided the payoff is big enough, and the payback on the big wins is big enough. MMOGs are casino capitalism at its finest. Not every bet is going to win. The industry just has to produce enough big investment wins to keep the gamblers at the table.

[palmer_eldritch]

Funcom's shares are 51 per cent up on 12 months ago according to this site:

http://www.sharewatch.com/norway.php

So I reckon some of their investors must be pretty happy.

[Murgos]

Its about investors not creditors.  Creditors are just happy you pay off your loans.  But Investers are going want to return on their investment to justify the high-risk endevor like an MMO rather than do something safer with the money.

You are confused, or quibbling over semantics that are pretty much identical in meaning.  The investor is simply, and only, trying to find a higher return for his investment than he could have gotten though other means.  The higher the return, generally the more risk.  The investor IS a creditor.  Often with the stupidity of accepting stock as a collateral, rather than a tangible asset but, creditor nonetheless.

If you own a crap load of stock in a company you are more than happy to watch it grow, no matter how slowly.

[lamaros]

You people are strange.  As long as the business makes enough money to service their debt and pay their expenses it's a success.  It's that simple.  Some of the most successful businesses in the world have done just that plus a couple of percent a year (not even that for non-profits) for generations.

They don't need to pay back 40 mil the day after the product launches, they don't need 100% returns yearly or any other such nonsense.

This tangent is all well as good but can someone can please point me to the bit where someone said "if it doesn't make back it's money in 1 year it's a failure" or "if it's not making heaps!! of money now it should be taken offline", and all the other 'points' you financial gurus are arguing against?

By that logic the Microsoft's and Sony's consoles weren't a success and should have cut them because they haven't made back their initial investment yet after 2+ years.

Funny you should say that... by themselves many consoles don't make their costs back. But they're good longterm investments for the companies because of the residuals.

Which is the case for MMOs. Yea, it's nice if you can recoup your upfront investment from box sales alone. But I would imagine that has not been common in recent years. And really, not doing so merely means you're amortizing the investment over a longer period of monthly subscriptions. So you account for that when assessing team size and resources for the Live game.

And this is where we come to the point about expected revenue (box sales & subscribers make the majority of this, I expect) against expected running and startup costs over a projected period. The people saying the AoC has this in the bag would do well to raise and defend such projections.

stuff

I am not asserting any facts about Funcom's business model. I did not claim that losing money one week and making it the next is a good business model. All I wrote is that if Funcom has sufficient revenue from subscriptions to maintain a profitable existence, then the company will be fine regardless of how much they spent on initial development. Then I laid out a very simplistic mathematical test of what current investors expect as an earnings stream.

Then you got ornery and started demanding sources.

Exactly. You said "you guys know nothing about business, funcom will be ok because of assumed information". No one was making a general point about running a business that required you coming in to enlighten us about, so provide some basis for your position or take your pedantry somewhere relevent.

The relative success of AoC to other mmos is not something that you can just assume. Unless someone has figures and projections, info about the investment and et cetera then it's all hot air, and it's as stupid to assert that AoC will not be all that sucessful as it is to assert that it will.

[tazelbain]

http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/a-qa-with-mark-jacobs-eas-chief-warrior-on-warhammer-online/

So if I understand MJ...  If you spend 25mil you need 100k subs to make money and 250k to be a hit.  I assume once you pay off your orginal debt, the theshold drops.

[HaemishM]

http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/a-qa-with-mark-jacobs-eas-chief-warrior-on-warhammer-online/

So if I understand MJ...  If you spend 25mil you need 100k subs to make money and 250k to be a hit.  I assume once you pay off your orginal debt, the theshold drops.

From that article:

We have almost 700,000 people signed up for our beta test. That’s ridiculous. I want a million.

Put my ass in beta then, motherfucker. Shit, how long a brother gotta hold out for that? 

[schild]

You're already signed up. He said signups, not ninnies running around Not Betatesting.

[slog]

Its about investors not creditors.  Creditors are just happy you pay off your loans.  But Investers are going want to return on their investment to justify the high-risk endevor like an MMO rather than do something safer with the money.

You are confused, or quibbling over semantics that are pretty much identical in meaning.  The investor is simply, and only, trying to find a higher return for his investment than he could have gotten though other means.  The higher the return, generally the more risk.  The investor IS a creditor.  Often with the stupidity of accepting stock as a collateral, rather than a tangible asset but, creditor nonetheless.

If you own a crap load of stock in a company you are more than happy to watch it grow, no matter how slowly.

Where he writes "creditors" I think he means "lenders" or maybe "owners of Bonds issues by the company"

[HaemishM]

You're already signed up. He said signups, not ninnies running around Not Betatesting.

I'm a Betatesting Ninny fool. I just have nothing to betatest.

[NiX]

I'm a Betatesting Ninny fool. I just have nothing to betatest.

If you get Conan you can /bugreport all day long!

[Falconeer]

Million.

EDIT: (go figure, I am late. There's a thread about it)

[schild]

Well, we can update this thread with the fact it's 500k players now rather than 400k. Call me crazy, but I bet they send out an email that says 600k players in another week.

[Numtini]

This is shooting the hell out of our "after WOW games will need to be stable and finished" ideas isn't it.

[Typhon]

Well, this was a pretty stable release that they patched often (and well), which resulted in a fair amount of server down time.  All told, one of the more stable launches.

"Complete", on the other hand, is worthy of some conversation.  I'd say that the equation is; "complete enough" + patching frequently (and well!) = worth a sub

[Murgos]

I don't recall WoWs launch being much more stable or complete than this.  I recall long, unexpected server downtimes and complaints of little high-level content for WoW at launch as well.

I'm sure if we looked around we could find our launch thread on it.

[Slayerik]

Horrible server queues cause my old guild to have to switch to a different PVP server in WoW, but in all it was a good launch.

I'm pretty sure they had tons more problems than Funcom did with their account/billing page. So kudos to FC on that one.

[Slayerik]

And......

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12021.msg399518#msg399518

I called it ... It is a fun game and it will hold 200k+ subs in 12/08   

[Numtini]

I remember queues and I think some server crashes? For that matter, don't they still sometimes have extensive downtime on some of their servers. I don't remember billing problems. I did have problems with setting up an account with funcom, but I think that was limited to people who had AO accounts.

[Miasma]

I don't remember any problems with WoW's launch on my server.  I know some other servers were crashing under the load but mine seemed fine.  WoW was definitely a smoother launch, Funcom make a lot of annoying decisions with timing, delays, account management etc.  WoW was also finished when it launched and had radically fewer bugs and problems.  My only main complaint was that the horde side was less fleshed out than the alliance.

That said I honestly didn't think AoC would manage to keep their servers up, I thought it would be an epic trainwreck far worse than Hellgate but better than AO and I was wrong.  Funcom did a lot better than I thought they would, but of course my expectations were incredibly low.

[Mrbloodworth]

This is shooting the hell out of our "after WOW games will need to be stable and finished" ideas isn't it.

Fun trumps all.

[Pendan]

I wonder if the are having good patches because they have left the closed beta servers up and are getting things looked at before they go to live server?

[Miasma]

Their patches aren't good.  They introduce almost as many bugs as they fix.

Edit: And they don't list the most important nerfs/changes in the notes.

[Bunk]

This is shooting the hell out of our "after WOW games will need to be stable and finished" ideas isn't it.

It's holding me away for now...

[schild]

Their patches aren't good.  They introduce almost as many bugs as they fix.

Those patches have had more stealth fixes that worked flawlessly than things they advertised. The number of broken things is nowhere near the number of fixes.

The broken things have been....highly visible though - like buff/debuff stacking and cotton breaking. Though, they said they turned cotton off. Which I suppose makes sense. Whatever, point being, they don't break as much as they fix.

Edit: And they don't list the most important nerfs/changes in the notes.

This is a huge problem.

[Bunk]

Well fuck. I made the mistake of reading the subforum, and now I'm considering wasting my money on this.

You have ten minutes to convince me otherwise, or I'll likely end up buying it at lunch...

[schild]

Why would anyone convince you otherwise?

It's very, very hard to find any serious flaws in the first 40 levels of the game, unless you're a mage.

After that, it's a crapshoot. 40-50 seems well-filled out, particularly if you're a soloable class. After that, well, let's just say the level cap is 50 right now.

[Merusk]

Well fuck. I made the mistake of reading the subforum, and now I'm considering wasting my money on this.

You have ten minutes to convince me otherwise, or I'll likely end up buying it at lunch...

It's F13.  Things always go good for the first 2 months. Give it another 3 weeks or major game release then see where things stand.

[Venkman]

Why would anyone convince you otherwise?

It's very, very hard to find any serious flaws in the first 40 levels of the game, unless you're a mage.

After that, it's a crapshoot. 40-50 seems well-filled out, particularly if you're a soloable class. After that, well, let's just say the level cap is 50 right now.

So I like the magery stuff they had in the earliest levels. Does their power suck after that? I'm looking for a good ranged DPSer that uses Magic. I really can't recall what I played near the end of beta though that I was enjoying. ToS maybe? Does Lightning and Fire. Thoughts? I just bought Mass Effect, which is freakin' awesome, but I still have hopes for AoC and wouldn't mind getting leveled up before the inevitable "balancing" begins. It's fun to play good games when they're broken enough you can advance fast and amass wealth

[schild]

Then play a Priest of Mitra or Tempest of Set if you want to get someone leveled before nerfs. Or a Ranger.

[Bunk]

So your suggesting I don't play a mage because they are bad currently, or because they are due to be nerferd? (I bought it at lunch of course)

[schild]

They're bad. You want to play a mage, play a priest. Better mages anyway.