Funcom Loses $23M, Age of Conan Subscribers Fall Below 100,000

So disappointed that they drug a great IP through the mud like this. And they still haven't even bothered to add the dx10 support they bragged about and said would be in at launch. Hope they can pull something off though, Vanguard went through the same shitter and its still kicking it and is a much improved game to boot. The problem with Conan is, they were bold face fucking lairs with just about everything have to do with the game. Fuckers.

If 100% of Funcom's gross income came from nothing but $14.95 AoC subs, they couldn't have more than 194,000 paying clients. Since they have other games, are still selling product on some store shelves (though Wal-Mart in our area has stopped selling the game) it is obvious that yes, it is very possible AoC is under 100,000 players now.

The fact is that Funcom tried to sell a product that simply was not finished, promised things they haven't delivered, or when they did, were buggy, and collectively, for any improvement, it burned trust with the MMO market. A market that is now vastly more jaded for having been burned several times.

AoC will fail, it almost certainly will close, and Funcom as a company will struggle to survive because of wanton Hubris of people trying to sell to a tiny fragment of the total market....badly.

Poor Funcom, AO was one of the best mmo's ever :(

The 100'000 subscriber number is is only an estimate by analyst Fredrik Thoresen, the official shareholder info does not really go into detail. The negative and inconcise way Conan has been portrayed on Shacknews is quite baffling to me.

odd that people judge AoC based solely on what it was at launch. it's almost been a year since then, it's nowhere near the stage it was at launch. it's an mmo things change in mmos

Where is the bloody demo already!? I've been waiting a year!

The world can only support so many non-WoW mmorpgs.

Is there anything on the horizon that looks like it could compete with WoW? (for my mmorpg time)

Just curious as Id like to try something new.

something is wrong .

if you have under 100k subscribers paying 15.00 a month and you are loosing money

then something is seriously wrong with the business plan . not just the game.

warhammer online is next lol

Just like a real lover, amazing looking tits and ass can only be one's primary interest in a game for a short amount of time - and once the dumb starts to annoy too much it's time to bail.

Well shit, there goes any chance of a Dreamfall sequel.

A terrible company that deserves every failing it receives. They shouldn't get away with ripping us off so badly. They clearly have a talented graphics team, the game is beautiful. Unfortunately the management at the company is a reflection of an unethical business out to make a quick buck.

What's crazy is they took my money when AO launched too. The signs were there and I ignored them :/

I wonder how many of those sub-100k are non active players who have forgotten to cancel.

Sorry to break it to them but devs/publishers gamers only have so much money to spread around so if the are even playing a mmorpg at all it's generally only going to be one.

So I'm not surprised at the huge majority of them failing.

Did they ever do a free trial? I wanted to try but never heard about it. Too late now though - back into WOW again...

I had HUGE hopes for this game when it was announced and when it was released. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed. What a piece of junk it turned out to be.

I was so excited about this game before it went on sale. The graphics looked great, the fighting looked great. So I decided to buy the collectors edition of the game. Due to the following design decisions/flaws, I was very disappointed with the product, and could not force myself to play it anymore after spending a week with it.

- So much stuff is instanced. I hated Guild Wars for this very reason, you can chat with your buddy, but guess what, you can't see him, he's not in the same instance as you even though you're grouped. i can't see why developers keep designing MMOs like this even though they know the only good way to do it is like WoW, where the realm is the division, but once you're on a realm, other than within dungeons, everyone shares the same world. It was incredibly lame that within one realm players were scattered among different parallel instances of that realm.

- The graphics engine wasn't well optimized. I had a GTX 280 and a brand new 45nm dual core and 2 GB of RAM. I can run Far Cry 2 at max max everything, and Age of Conan ran like shit on my computer when I turned everything up.

- The promise of a sexy universe. One of the facets of this game that intrigued me was the claim that the game was mature. I was hoping you could do mature things with the NPCs, i was hoping for some mature interaction, and all you get is the ability to remove your own armor and see some nipple. What a let down. There are whores in the game, but you can't sleep with them. Doh! Why have hookers that don't function?

yeah maybe I'm shallow, but I gave the game 30 hours of my life and was extremely disappointed. I wanted this game to be as cool as it sounded.

I did think the environments were pretty, but the divided realms and overly instanced content really turned me off. Instance content based on group, not by arbitrary player count.

Not shocked, let's just say after years of playing AO Funcom isn't my favorite studio.

There may be light at the end of the tunnel as Funcom is planning to release the game in Poland and Russia soon. The Conan mythology is huge there.

Sad :( they've at least kept putting effort into the game. I thought the way they presented the Conan lore was excellent and the atmosphere was great (I was never interested in the Conan lore until playing the game, and purchased a few of the original books as a result of the playing the game). AoC has some really imaginative quests, gorgeous graphics at times, and they've been committed to adding new stuff (although a lot of it perhaps should have been there at the beginning). It saddens me when people drastically exaggerate the crappy sides of the game, as they are misrepresenting it based on limited play time (usually from the first few months of release, when it was in a much worse state than it is now, although still funner than is implied).