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Funcom stocks falling quick
Those shareholders who wouldn't listen to our warnings lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone knows that stock markets around the world have taken a hit for some months now but Funcom stock's performance is abysmally poor. Funcom tried to borrow tens of millions of dollars a few years back, a request that shrewd bankers wisely refused to entertain. Now we see the result. The final result have showed and the hyper have peaked. Now Funcom share start to sky drop as seen on the graph!!!.
Having played the game for a month out of beta, I am not surprised by this turn of events at all.
A) AWFUL login interface. You had to login through their web page, which was done...ooohhh, about FIVE YEARS AGO with little success. Why in gods name did they think it would work now?
Bad graphics engine/lag. There wasn't a top end machine out there that could run the game at medium settings with more than 20 FPS. I am used to low graphics in MMORPGs but this takes the cake. SWG is the only other game I know to do this and it has FAR more interactive modeling/animation and structure. There was no excuse to have such a poorly coded graphics engine, most times you wouldn't even load an NPC until you waited for 30 seconds in the same room, and even then they loaded as a grey polygon model for the next 2 minutes while it tried to load their color skin.
C) Promises made, not kept. A LOT of inovation and design went through with this game and quite a bit was promised in beta or told there was so much more to be shown upon release but they wanted to keep it secret. NONE of this secret stuff ever appeared, the bugs and promises made never appeared and they made not even 1 small jump in performance or enhancement from beta to release.
Overall, this has to be the most pathetic excuse for a GAME (not just a MMO) I've ever played in my life. Rubies of Eventide had a better chance at surviving than these people ever did. I'm honestly glad their game never made it big, hopefully they won't ever try again and others will learn from this mistake.
After reading thos post on the other forums it looks like bad management all round I did not see either of the 200 Co-worker doing a good job.Bad management usually leads to business failure and Age of Conan does not seem exempt from that rule.
I suspect the chain of causes looks like this: Bad management leads to incoherent execution of original design leading derivative (safe) design decisions to finish and ship the product. So I agree that Age of Conan failed to take off because it lacked differentiation from other games but I think the cause was bad management not a failure by any one designers to come up with original ideas.
Comments
aha
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CASUAL CONFESSIONS - Draccan's blog
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It's been raising in the last months only based on the AOC hype. Now reality is taking over.
OMGOOSES! The sky really is falling!
Seriously no one cares about stocks unless they are invested in them.
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You wouldn't understand
*looks around at all the surprised faces*
Nope, no surprise here....
Press Release:
Development has ceased on the forthcomming MMORPG The Secret World. The development team have be moved to other departments within Funcom.
Be paid for Beta Testing, don't pay to Beta Test.
Aoc's problem is they didn't strip their original goals down far enough. Their plans made Age of Conan look like a joke, and yet despite huge funding, funcom is accused of only delivering a shallowly game across the webboard.
Spoils of War - The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Despite all of the technical failures that can be listed I think that the greatest factor in the games demise is management. Gaute Godager and Jørgen Tharaldsen succesfully usurped control of the company and the game from Trond Arne and proceeded to undermine the product presumably to squeeze out as many dollars as possible before it would inevitably go belly up.
Thanks for those top-notch visual aids! They helped me understand the whole situation
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But I have to go with "no one cares about stocks unless they've invested in them" because if Funcom turns this around the stocks will more than likely rise again in a few months. I haven't lost any money, even if they have, so I'm fine with it.
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A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
Stocks have a bearing on the companies worth. If Funcom goes belly up, who will take over AOC if the game has a future at all. My guess is SOE would take it over. They seem to like games of this quality.
It's like SOE shops for mmo's at garage sales and picks them up at steep discounts. Then they try to polish it up much as they can and put it on life support. Yup....Funcom should be expecting a call from SOE anytime now. LOL.
Are you by any chance a reporter for the SUN? Or the BILD in germany? XD That Post kind of reminded me of Tabloid Headlines in the boulevard press.
No offense.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
If Funcom's demise gives you so much joy that you need to gloat about it. Your definilty in need of a life.
I didnt enjoy the game that much either, but damn man..... move on.
Congratulations to those who bought Funcom shares back in February!
Login through their website? What for account management?
Actually there were a considerable number of players who were able to achieve top graphics and a stable FPS. Judging by this statement, im guessing you logged into AoC for a few hours, couldnt get the results your desired, didnt try the solutions out there on the forum, then quit.
That said, this IS a problem, however there are solutions out there and even so the graphics are still impressive, but then I suppose argueing aesthetics is all perspective and taste.
So how did you get into this inner circle where "secret" stuff is discussed?
Yep, no performance boosts.
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I look at that chart and see a stock that has had its value raise 225% since February...
During the same period, Vivendi has lost stock price. (Down about 25% from November until now).
Therefore I expect SOE to be running WoW by the end of the year.
Seriously?
Yet it doesn't have sieges, the ability to make t3 cities, pvp xp, blood money, or dx10? So while to you it may be a fox containing some fun, to others it came completely devoid of it.
Spoils of War - The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
I'm only posting in this thread because I have a weakness for graphs....
I don't know a damn thing about stocks, but I definitely don't think it's a coincidence that about the time that the first free month is up is also the time where the line starts heading south for the black line at the bottom of the page. And I'm pretty sure that means bad things. I also don't think it's a coincidence that line is heading straight up right before release.
But I don't know anything about fiscal whatevers and financial whatchmacallits. But I do know if that line represents the value of the company, then the line is a sad panda in June.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.
I'm sure Funcom predicted this. That won't change the fact that this game will release on X-box. Just before the X-box date, you will see that stock market line rise again. After the x-box release it will only drop a little bit. Why? Because the game will run flawlessly on X-box, and it will have most of the content promised to us PC users.
That is what funcom is putting all their money on.
The only things that can break this little plan, is for the game to get some horribly bad press or get hit with a major lawsuit by consumers. The time for bad press is just about passed and Funcom has survived it by getting good reviews for the game by major gaming sites and magazines.
Is it just me, but by the looks of the 2 graphs, it seems that Funcom is still doing better off now than they did at the beginning of the year?
in all fairness there is a trend in Funcom's trading history of spikes, I guess the spikes are when they launched a new game.
Seems it will level out between 20-30 again sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile back in the Real World, there are global problems with stocks & shares at present that are likely to have at least some effect on all industry sectors.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/18/cnrbs118.xml
Given the current financial instability, this sort of nit-picking speculation about the Funcom share price doesn't necessarily reflect the success of the game & just seems to be yet another troll thread.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
Take the Hecatomb? TCG What Is Your Doom? quiz.
you people are so sad... best mmo listed to date and because you can't figure out how to run it and then play it.. you trash it..
<Mod edit>. If you know the tiniest of things about stocks, youd know that this is common. Have you ever thought of how much production, advertisements and such will cost? It will go up again, and down again.
One of the roles of a producer is to maintain budgets, and I am assuming financial problems are not looked upon favorably in Funcom. We've all heard of entrepreneurs that go broke because they engage in too large project they could handle. The main idea of this approach is straightforward.
1) A possible funcom bankruptcy is the principal factor restricting the amount of borrowed capital (hint hint, shares).
2) Aassess the probabilities of bankruptcy at various time horizons in the future dependent on the proportion of debt capital (and other indices of a firm's current financial position)
3) Calculate how these probabilities influence the firm's value.
edit: typo
I wonder how much money Gaute embezzled from funcom while making aoc? That 30m investment they got for development didn't go to making content thats for sure. Oh and the rumors are it was MS ala vanguard......
LMGDAO I love it. Thank you for delivering my humor for the day.
As if you worked at Smith Barney and are going to school us on how FunCom is going to soon go insolvent.
LMGDAO.
Look at any other stock for any other company that you consider moderately successful like.. oh.. I dont know... Sony or Microsoft .. DOW chemical.. freaking Exxon.
LMGDAo jesus