Lit is articulate and presents his guesses well, at the end of the day, they are just guesses.
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
Lit's guesses so far = the company is going to show a loss in the upcoming quarterly report- accuracy so far =100%
Fanboy's guesses = the game is doing great, company is doing great and the upcoming patch will be the miracle patch - accuracy so far = 0%
Avery wern't you the one who kept insisting the game was ready for release when it was still in beta ?
I think Lit is the winner here so far
I will put my bet on the Funcom is still losing money on the game when the report is made public. I think the good news for investors is that the stock has seemed to level off at around the $0.65 USD mark which is much better than it was last quarter when it was bouncing around the 30 and 40 cent range. Kind of sad though to think that just a year ago it was worth ten times that though.
Lit is articulate and presents his guesses well, at the end of the day, they are just guesses.
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
What alternate reality do you guys live in?
The one where Funcom isn't bankrupt, Funcom didn't have mass layoffs, Funcom's stock never reached zero, Funcom wasn't removed from the Oslo Bors, Secret World wasn't cancelled , ands AoC didn't close down. You know, that alternate reality.
All of those things can still happen with very little effort. And Funcom is famous for being well versed in the "little effort" category.
However, my comment is in regards to Lits' financial forecast as far as predictions for losses in quarterly reports and such, where he has been right every time as far asI can tell. Lits' guesses have not been "wrong every time", as Guillermo would like to think. And, well, Avery has been in Funcom la-la land from the beginning. Why his opinions regarding anything Funcom are even taken with any sort of serious credit nowadays is beyond me. He's as far up their virtual keister as you can get and still breathe right.
The one where Funcom isn't bankrupt, Funcom didn't have mass layoffs, Funcom's stock never reached zero, Funcom wasn't removed from the Oslo Bors, Secret World wasn't cancelled , ands AoC didn't close down. You know, that alternate reality.
All of those things can still happen with very little effort. And Funcom is famous for being well versed in the "little effort" category.
However, my comment is in regards to Lits' financial forecast as far as predictions for losses in quarterly reports and such, where he has been right every time as far asI can tell. Lits' guesses have not been "wrong every time", as Guillermo would like to think. And, well, Avery has been in Funcom la-la land from the beginning. Why his opinions regarding anything Funcom are even taken with any sort of serious credit nowadays is beyond me. He's as far up their virtual keister as you can get and still breathe right.
I am not thinking anything. I am more realistic, enjoy the games I play, contribute into a wide variarity of discussions on the internet.....
instead of people like Lit wasting their life bashing a company in a desperate hope it goes bankrupt so he/she can fulfill his/her sick prophecised fantasy.
About the bankrupsy theory. Half of the balanse sheet for Funcom is Cash... That should count for something...
The most important notice in the reports is how the cashflow is going. (since the "loss" is mainly things already payed for). If the cashflow is going red then there is just time before the company must scrap some project and sack some eployees.
It is hard for me to see wich project will be scrapped. I think they will scale down first tbh. AoC is generating cash so it will not be scrapped. Secret World on the other hand... risky project, brings to many new things to the table. Might be scaled down to alot to avoid the risks....
About the bankrupsy theory. Half of the balanse sheet for Funcom is Cash... That should count for something...
The most important notice in the reports is how the cashflow is going. (since the "loss" is mainly things already payed for). If the cashflow is going red then there is just time before the company must scrap some project and sack some eployees. It is hard for me to see wich project will be scrapped. I think they will scale down first tbh. AoC is generating cash so it will not be scrapped. Secret World on the other hand... risky project, brings to many new things to the table. Might be scaled down to alot to avoid the risks....
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
About the bankrupsy theory. Half of the balanse sheet for Funcom is Cash... That should count for something...
The most important notice in the reports is how the cashflow is going. (since the "loss" is mainly things already payed for). If the cashflow is going red then there is just time before the company must scrap some project and sack some eployees. It is hard for me to see wich project will be scrapped. I think they will scale down first tbh. AoC is generating cash so it will not be scrapped. Secret World on the other hand... risky project, brings to many new things to the table. Might be scaled down to alot to avoid the risks....
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
Radlaban understands business just fine he is absolutely correct. There is one alternate solution that Funcom has used so many times, namely issuing new stocks. Money wont be a problem for them for a very looooooong time.
AO is more than 7 years old with probably less than 20K subscribers. Still it is making money and they keep supporting it. However given this info i find it natural that Funcom focuses on AoC. Another thing. After patch 1.05 Funcom will probably be able to free up resources from AoC and either sack them (i.e. save money) or transfer them to TSW. In addition they are developing several casual mmos. So in fact they are supporting 2 full MMO's, developing 1 new and making several casual ones. Dosent sound like their in trouble to me.
If they decide to focus less on AoC, they will sack half their staff and focus on TSW and then make money. Remove costs, quite simple actually, however not a very attractive situation so they should be working hard to avvoid that.
Guess thats one of the reasons why the CEO bought 250.000 shares a couple of months ago from his own money. If he beleived the company would go belly up he would have thrown away 125.000 USD.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
For what it's worth I picked up the AoC Collector's edition the other week for $10. Though I'd finally give the game a shot. So far it's been great fun. Now, I've only made it to level 28 but I'm enjoying it a lot.
There hasn't been any grouping at all so far for me, as every group I hear of is 40-80, but I'm enjoying my self enough that I'll sign up for another month at least.
About the bankrupsy theory. Half of the balanse sheet for Funcom is Cash... That should count for something...
The most important notice in the reports is how the cashflow is going. (since the "loss" is mainly things already payed for). If the cashflow is going red then there is just time before the company must scrap some project and sack some eployees. It is hard for me to see wich project will be scrapped. I think they will scale down first tbh. AoC is generating cash so it will not be scrapped. Secret World on the other hand... risky project, brings to many new things to the table. Might be scaled down to alot to avoid the risks....
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
Radlaban understands business just fine he is absolutely correct. There is one alternate solution that Funcom has used so many times, namely issuing new stocks. Money wont be a problem for them for a very looooooong time.
AO is more than 7 years old with probably less than 20K subscribers. Still it is making money and they keep supporting it. However given this info i find it natural that Funcom focuses on AoC. Another thing. After patch 1.05 Funcom will probably be able to free up resources from AoC and either sack them (i.e. save money) or transfer them to TSW. In addition they are developing several casual mmos. So in fact they are supporting 2 full MMO's, developing 1 new and making several casual ones. Dosent sound like their in trouble to me.
If they decide to focus less on AoC, they will sack half their staff and focus on TSW and then make money. Remove costs, quite simple actually, however not a very attractive situation so they should be working hard to avvoid that.
Guess thats one of the reasons why the CEO bought 250.000 shares a couple of months ago from his own money. If he beleived the company would go belly up he would have thrown away 125.000 USD.
No no no.. he is not correct. He's saying that when Funcom is in trouble they would remove people from Secret World project because it's too risky. They will most definitely not do that unless they are total idiots. When the shit hits the fan they will put all their top guys on Secret World and try to finish it as soon as possible in order to get cash from those initial sales.
I'm not saying Funcom will go belly up. Only time will tell if that happens or not. I'm just saying the moment Secret World launches Age of Conan will be a very low priority for Funcom. They will keep a handful of employees with AoC while all other work with Secret World. At that point Anarchy Online will be run by the office cleaning lady.
Let me inform you of the situation. I'm not speaking of profits, losses, EBITs, expenses, or anything of the like. I'm simply focusing on Funcom's revenue as a reliable source of Funcom's subscription revenue and thus Age of Conan's subscription rate.
It is pretty simple. Just follow along.
Step 1: Funcom has, currently, only 3 relevant sources of revenue: Age of Conan Subscriptions, Age of Conan box sales, and Anarchy Online Subscriptions.
Step 2: Anarchy Online was, substantially, Funcom's only source of PC revenue for one or two years. This amount ranged from $800,000 to $1,200,000. In the grand scheme of subscription analysis, the variation is a drop in the bucket. For any analysis I do I stick the number at $1,000,000, which I believe is a reasonable estimate.
Step 3: Box sale/Direct Drive/Steam Revenue: I generally leave this at an insignificant number: 10,000 boxes every 3 months. I don't want to be accused of artificially boosting box revenue to skew subscription numbers down. Although ultimately if AoC is selling no new copies, the game is doomed.
Step 4: Now you are stuck with a number, divided by 3 months and by subscription revenue, which accurately describes Age of Conan's subscription total. Plutolife is done with and accounted for, as is described in Funcom's last quarterly report.
So sir, if you can't go to funcom.com and look in investor relations to find the last 3 years of quarterly reports, that is your own problem. As it stands, we have an accurate measure of Funcom's incoming revenue, based mostly on Age of Conan subscriptions. And if Funcom is getting a lot more money from box sales, the subscription situation is even worse...but I give AoC the benefit of the doubt just so I can detract naysayers such as yourself.
So I don't need to analyze any other numbers, although I could if needed. Funcom is a company that loaded itself with a bunch of long-term low-interest debt to arrive at the cash flow it currently has, because it certainly has never earned any portion of that. Stockholders and bondholders alike bought into the risk which is AoC, and that risk has blossomed into a 50-90% loss for original and recent stock purchasers and a capital loss for bondholders. And don't tell me how to read a balance sheet <edited, reposted> I'm a lawyer who has a $19,000,000+ trust account that needs to be reconciled weekly. I understand how to read a ledger.
Man I am glad that there is no Human wich know`s everything.
I mean if most Banks in the World, have a finance disaster, because the ones who learned the profession, were mistake.
I won t attack you Litigator, it`s most likely the case that you know more than I do about such matters....but well, why should I care? I like this game so I am playing it. The Subscriber`s are rising, they still have stock left.Ì don t have to Fear the Server will be shut up...I mean look at anarchy only, there still up.
Lit is articulate and presents his guesses well, at the end of the day, they are just guesses.
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
Lit's previous post history have been very spot on. He have "guessed" the revenue numbers too precisly for it to be just guesses.
Even tho with the new faces we are seeing there is no denying the fact that DFO has taken people from AoC, so if AoC are gaining subscribers or simply replacing the ones they have lost to DFO and those who quit the game only time will tell. . If Funcom can't generate enough money they will either have to scrap certain products or they will be forced to close the door on the company. Which would be a loss to the MMO community as funcom is a company that does have the balls to not make a WoW clone.
I guess we will see the result in the report in May, hopefully they have managed to start earning some money on aoc again.
Playing: Battlefield - Bad company (Xbox360) Arma2, DFO (PC) On my radar: TSW, MO MMO's played: SWG (pre cu/cu), WoW, AoC, WAR, DFO, Planetside MMO's that I have tested: Lotro, L2, Aion, Ryzom
I'm not an AoC player, but who pays for the 1-month sub price on any MMO anymore? I would assume that the 3 month sub price is about $13-$14 a month and the 6 month sub even less? So, the $15 month figure is always a tad unrealistic.
Now, if your talking about earnings (net profit) - yeah .. the company is being hit hard. They are now being taxed at a higher rate because of the increased revenue, they have a very large operations expense and have a bit of debt. 33M per year when spread between the government, payroll, operations, IT and creditors is not very much when you think about it.
There is much, much more on whether a company is sucessful or not than the product or service it sells.
This is a honest question. However I would remind the poster that Age of Conan has more than half of its servers in Europe. Europeans pay their subscription in Pounds and in Euros. And in both cases the price is far more than $15 US per month. Even with multi-month subscriptions the price is closer to $19 US a month.
I also would submit that the typical subscriber signs up month to month.
Lit I agree with your method of arriving at subscription numbers. However your data is outdated. Its from february when they guided 6-8 mill USD for 1q. This means we know what subscription numbers Funcom have predictet up to 31 March. Its old news. Its reflected in the stock price. Also, we dont know if they will come in over or under guidance. Probably they will come within that interval.
What is interresting is what they will guide for 2q, as we allready are 1 month into it. THAT will tell us on what is happening with subscription figures.
Another thing, please dont brag about reading balance sheets because you either havent understood Funcoms or you havent read it. Funcom has debt but they have even more cash. That means that they can pay their obligations and be debt free in an eyeblink.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Step 1: Funcom has, currently, only 3 relevant sources of revenue: Age of Conan Subscriptions, Age of Conan box sales, and Anarchy Online Subscriptions.
Lit
Not only is this wrong it's absurd on the face of it. When is any source of revenue irrelevant? You're still just pulling numbers out of your ass whether you believe they are reasonable or not.
You ask when a source of revenue is irrelevant.
Answer: A source of company revenue is irrelevant when it does not change your analysis either way. That is, if you factor it in, your answer is the same as if you had not factored it in.
Context: Funcom has another source of revenue: The Dreamfall franchise. No doubt they probably earn some money from it still. However, am I going to factor that in just so I can adjust Age of Conan subscriptions from (whatever I calculate them to be) to (whatever I calculate them to be - 600?) Hardly. That makes it irrelevant. Understand?
And sorry zym, the numbers come from Funcom's own guidance. Funcom's own presentations.
Lit I agree with your method of arriving at subscription numbers. However your data is outdated. Its from february when they guided 6-8 mill USD for 1q. This means we know what subscription numbers Funcom have predictet up to 31 March. Its old news. Its reflected in the stock price. Also, we dont know if they will come in over or under guidance. Probably they will come within that interval. What is interresting is what they will guide for 2q, as we allready are 1 month into it. THAT will tell us on what is happening with subscription figures. Another thing, please dont brag about reading balance sheets because you either havent understood Funcoms or you havent read it. Funcom has debt but they have even more cash. That means that they can pay their obligations and be debt free in an eyeblink.
Ace: I agree with you up until "its reflected in the stock price". Obviously its guidance was made in early February. That is the whole deal with prognosis and analysis...taking Funcom's guidance and extrapolating since then.
I have done the extrapolation. I think Funcom is going to end up within guidance. And that spells a decrease in subscribers from the Oct-Dec period to the Jan-March period.
And next quarter supporters of the game will call this quarter's guidance "old news". But eventually something has to give. If this game is going to survive it requires paid subscriptions to increase. It certainly won't be shown in this quarter's numbers. And at what point is "breaking even" just continued failure? 75,000 subscribers one quarter and 75,000 the next? At some point revenue has to start increasing or AoC development is going to be drastically slashed. They don't have that much longer.
I'm horrible at math and too poor to know any of that stock talk but Lit has been right about everything else I recall him posting about funcom numbers in the past.
I do though agree that if you enjoy playing the game and are having fun none of this should matter to you anyway continue to play and take solace in the fact that most mmos live reasonably long lives if you consider what SWG,MXO,COH/V and I'm sure others have went through but in that case this post shouldn't matter to you anyway.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Lit I agree with your method of arriving at subscription numbers. However your data is outdated. Its from february when they guided 6-8 mill USD for 1q. This means we know what subscription numbers Funcom have predictet up to 31 March. Its old news. Its reflected in the stock price. Also, we dont know if they will come in over or under guidance. Probably they will come within that interval. What is interresting is what they will guide for 2q, as we allready are 1 month into it. THAT will tell us on what is happening with subscription figures. Another thing, please dont brag about reading balance sheets because you either havent understood Funcoms or you havent read it. Funcom has debt but they have even more cash. That means that they can pay their obligations and be debt free in an eyeblink.
Ace: I agree with you up until "its reflected in the stock price". Obviously its guidance was made in early February. That is the whole deal with prognosis and analysis...taking Funcom's guidance and extrapolating since then.
I have done the extrapolation. I think Funcom is going to end up within guidance. And that spells a decrease in subscribers from the Oct-Dec period to the Jan-March period.
And next quarter supporters of the game will call this quarter's guidance "old news". But eventually something has to give. If this game is going to survive it requires paid subscriptions to increase. It certainly won't be shown in this quarter's numbers. And at what point is "breaking even" just continued failure? 75,000 subscribers one quarter and 75,000 the next? At some point revenue has to start increasing or AoC development is going to be drastically slashed. They don't have that much longer.
I think Funcom basically is admitting they had a pretty significant drop in subscribers going into the 1st quarter.. why else would they give guidance for 25% decrease in revenues.
As far as stock price goes... You can easily say the stock price is too high considering the rapid decline expected in revenues coming from AOC.. and that would be correct... but TSW is starting to get talked about, so some of the share price of Funcom right now is anticipation of the launch of TSW. Where does the decline in revenue from AOC intersect with the hype being built for TSW?
At some point in the next 6 months, the revenues of AOC and AO will be insignificant compared to the hype for TSW when evaluating the stock price... that's just the way companies with very few products work.
I don't think anyone but a fanboy or a paid employee will claim the game is growing. Quite the contrary. Overall web traffic has been back on a downward trend since the january server merge spike and the free trial spike. It has been running at pre December levels for the last couple of weeks. Looks as if the trial version not generating enough new to make up for those on their way out the door. Their web forum advertising campaign is still strong though .
I don't think anyone but a fanboy or a paid employee will claim the game is growing. Quite the contrary. Overall web traffic has been back on a downward trend since the january server merge spike and the free trial spike. It has been running at pre December levels for the last couple of weeks. Looks as if the trial version not generating enough new to make up for those on their way out the door. Their web forum advertising campaign is still strong though .
I am pretty sure that AoC is experiencing a slow growth at the moment. The main indicator is xfire, but there are several other indicators. Namely forums, share price, and campaign activities. (please lets not discuss which ones are good or bad, they are all bad indicators imo)
Another thing is that Funcom said in February that the number of players had stabilized. This combined with the activities and stable interrest leads me to conclude that theres a slow growth.
Now - you can say i fall into the category "fanboy" so you can predict my answer. Well anyways, my 2c.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
I can't tell you if the game is growing or shrinking, and I don't know what their quarterly or annual numbers are. All I know is that after having resubbed 2 weeks ago I am having an awesome time. The game has done a 180 since I cancelled during my free 30 days last June. I haven't had this much fun since the early days of SWG.
I don't think anyone but a fanboy or a paid employee will claim the game is growing. Quite the contrary. Overall web traffic has been back on a downward trend since the january server merge spike and the free trial spike. It has been running at pre December levels for the last couple of weeks. Looks as if the trial version not generating enough new to make up for those on their way out the door. Their web forum advertising campaign is still strong though .
I am pretty sure that AoC is experiencing a slow growth at the moment. The main indicator is xfire, but there are several other indicators. Namely forums, share price, and campaign activities. (please lets not discuss which ones are good or bad, they are all bad indicators imo)
Another thing is that Funcom said in February that the number of players had stabilized. This combined with the activities and stable interrest leads me to conclude that theres a slow growth.
Now - you can say i fall into the category "fanboy" so you can predict my answer. Well anyways, my 2c.
I won't call you fanboy but I can see where you have never done any statistical analysis either.
if you are going to quote Xfire you can only use the numbers from the Xfire contest on in which case it has fallen. Forums are part of the web traffic which has been on a steady decline since post sever merge surge. Srock price has nothing to do with anything at all except optimism and in FC's case the company is worth almost as much dead and liqudated as it is alive at this point.
If there was slow growth as you put it the website traffic would mirror that. I can look at nothing more than a chart with website traffic numbers and point out every patch day, the free trial start, the server merge, the Xfire contest etc etc. Flatten the peaks and valleys and you can see a gradual downward trend. Now while probably less than 10% of the players ever visit the website on a regular basis you can monitor population trends simply because that less than percentage will fairly constant be whether the game has 100K players or 800K players or is moving between those extremes.
In simple terms if the game has 800k players and 10% of those visit the web site once a day then the site would get 80K hits, the game declines to 100K players then the site gets 10K hits,. It's a bit more complicated than that but you should see what I mean
Jackdog, first of all i tried to make it clear that i had no good figures to make any calculations. I actually do know (or did when i whent to business school) about statiscial analysis. One thing is clear, we do not have any good data source. The best we have is actually xfire, whic is crap. (please read again, xfire is crap, but the other tools are even worse)
I rely heavily on indications, there is no clear trend! That means that in best case AoC is slowly increasing its number of subs. I could be wrong, but all the "hi i am back and loving it" posts on eu, us and mmorpg forums, gives me an optimisitc feeling. I am guessing their numbers are growing SLOWLY. Its just that the genreal tone is overly positive at the moment, i cant be that bad with all the good feedback from the small ammount of poster.
Had there been a clear trend we would have seen all indicators climb, but as you correctly point out, the web traffic is flat (guessing alexa here) except from peaks during special events. So, no proof, but lots of indications. Thats what I have based my conclusion at the moment untill somebody proves me wrong. (woudl love that by the way, i dont like to rely on indications)
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Originally posted by Aceundor Jackdog, first of all i tried to make it clear that i had no good figures to make any calculations. I actually do know (or did when i whent to business school) about statiscial analysis. One thing is clear, we do not have any good data source. The best we have is actually xfire, whic is crap. (please read again, xfire is crap, but the other tools are even worse)
So what are you using for your base figure, Xfire numbers at launch, Xfire numbers pre December when the fanboys or Funcom employees posing as fanboys begged on the forums for players to install Xfire so as to artificaly inflate the numbers, or are you using the Xfire numbers pre contest or the did you just start with post contest Xfire numbers which introduced a few thousand AoC players to Xfire for the first time?
Instead try using the web page data which is much harder to manipulate because of the sheer volume of page hits and you can go all the way back to launch. Just this quarter it has dropped another 15% which is better than last quarter where it dropped over 30% and the second quarter after launch where it dropped 50%
It also tells quite a few other things such as that the game is wildly popular in Norway and Germany with the United Kngdom and Spain not far behind. In France, Italy, Sweden and Belgium quite a few people like it and it is more popular in Canada than it is in the US. In Mexico and Russia it is quite low on the web totem pole however.
I can also assume with some degree of accuracy that the average AoC player is male, some college, 18 - 34 years old, has no children, and is browsing from home.
Comments
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
Lit's guesses so far = the company is going to show a loss in the upcoming quarterly report- accuracy so far =100%
Fanboy's guesses = the game is doing great, company is doing great and the upcoming patch will be the miracle patch - accuracy so far = 0%
Avery wern't you the one who kept insisting the game was ready for release when it was still in beta ?
I think Lit is the winner here so far
I will put my bet on the Funcom is still losing money on the game when the report is made public. I think the good news for investors is that the stock has seemed to level off at around the $0.65 USD mark which is much better than it was last quarter when it was bouncing around the 30 and 40 cent range. Kind of sad though to think that just a year ago it was worth ten times that though.
I miss DAoC
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
What alternate reality do you guys live in?
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
What alternate reality do you guys live in?
The one where Funcom isn't bankrupt, Funcom didn't have mass layoffs, Funcom's stock never reached zero, Funcom wasn't removed from the Oslo Bors, Secret World wasn't cancelled , ands AoC didn't close down. You know, that alternate reality.
All of those things can still happen with very little effort. And Funcom is famous for being well versed in the "little effort" category.
However, my comment is in regards to Lits' financial forecast as far as predictions for losses in quarterly reports and such, where he has been right every time as far asI can tell. Lits' guesses have not been "wrong every time", as Guillermo would like to think. And, well, Avery has been in Funcom la-la land from the beginning. Why his opinions regarding anything Funcom are even taken with any sort of serious credit nowadays is beyond me. He's as far up their virtual keister as you can get and still breathe right.
The one where Funcom isn't bankrupt, Funcom didn't have mass layoffs, Funcom's stock never reached zero, Funcom wasn't removed from the Oslo Bors, Secret World wasn't cancelled , ands AoC didn't close down. You know, that alternate reality.
All of those things can still happen with very little effort. And Funcom is famous for being well versed in the "little effort" category.
However, my comment is in regards to Lits' financial forecast as far as predictions for losses in quarterly reports and such, where he has been right every time as far asI can tell. Lits' guesses have not been "wrong every time", as Guillermo would like to think. And, well, Avery has been in Funcom la-la land from the beginning. Why his opinions regarding anything Funcom are even taken with any sort of serious credit nowadays is beyond me. He's as far up their virtual keister as you can get and still breathe right.
I am not thinking anything. I am more realistic, enjoy the games I play, contribute into a wide variarity of discussions on the internet.....
instead of people like Lit wasting their life bashing a company in a desperate hope it goes bankrupt so he/she can fulfill his/her sick prophecised fantasy.
Cheers
About the bankrupsy theory. Half of the balanse sheet for Funcom is Cash... That should count for something...
The most important notice in the reports is how the cashflow is going. (since the "loss" is mainly things already payed for). If the cashflow is going red then there is just time before the company must scrap some project and sack some eployees.
It is hard for me to see wich project will be scrapped. I think they will scale down first tbh. AoC is generating cash so it will not be scrapped. Secret World on the other hand... risky project, brings to many new things to the table. Might be scaled down to alot to avoid the risks....
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
Radlaban understands business just fine he is absolutely correct. There is one alternate solution that Funcom has used so many times, namely issuing new stocks. Money wont be a problem for them for a very looooooong time.
AO is more than 7 years old with probably less than 20K subscribers. Still it is making money and they keep supporting it. However given this info i find it natural that Funcom focuses on AoC. Another thing. After patch 1.05 Funcom will probably be able to free up resources from AoC and either sack them (i.e. save money) or transfer them to TSW. In addition they are developing several casual mmos. So in fact they are supporting 2 full MMO's, developing 1 new and making several casual ones. Dosent sound like their in trouble to me.
If they decide to focus less on AoC, they will sack half their staff and focus on TSW and then make money. Remove costs, quite simple actually, however not a very attractive situation so they should be working hard to avvoid that.
Guess thats one of the reasons why the CEO bought 250.000 shares a couple of months ago from his own money. If he beleived the company would go belly up he would have thrown away 125.000 USD.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
For what it's worth I picked up the AoC Collector's edition the other week for $10. Though I'd finally give the game a shot. So far it's been great fun. Now, I've only made it to level 28 but I'm enjoying it a lot.
There hasn't been any grouping at all so far for me, as every group I hear of is 40-80, but I'm enjoying my self enough that I'll sign up for another month at least.
Your lack of business understanding is disturbing. If Funcom can hype up Secret World like they did Age of Conan, they will make tons of money when they release it. Those peanuts they make with Age of Conan or AO are nothing compared to that. So if something is going to be scaled down it's AO and AoC.
When Funcom released AoC , they totally forgot about AO. What makes you think they won't do the same with Secret World? Small developer like Funcom can only fully support one MMO.
Radlaban understands business just fine he is absolutely correct. There is one alternate solution that Funcom has used so many times, namely issuing new stocks. Money wont be a problem for them for a very looooooong time.
AO is more than 7 years old with probably less than 20K subscribers. Still it is making money and they keep supporting it. However given this info i find it natural that Funcom focuses on AoC. Another thing. After patch 1.05 Funcom will probably be able to free up resources from AoC and either sack them (i.e. save money) or transfer them to TSW. In addition they are developing several casual mmos. So in fact they are supporting 2 full MMO's, developing 1 new and making several casual ones. Dosent sound like their in trouble to me.
If they decide to focus less on AoC, they will sack half their staff and focus on TSW and then make money. Remove costs, quite simple actually, however not a very attractive situation so they should be working hard to avvoid that.
Guess thats one of the reasons why the CEO bought 250.000 shares a couple of months ago from his own money. If he beleived the company would go belly up he would have thrown away 125.000 USD.
No no no.. he is not correct. He's saying that when Funcom is in trouble they would remove people from Secret World project because it's too risky. They will most definitely not do that unless they are total idiots. When the shit hits the fan they will put all their top guys on Secret World and try to finish it as soon as possible in order to get cash from those initial sales.
I'm not saying Funcom will go belly up. Only time will tell if that happens or not. I'm just saying the moment Secret World launches Age of Conan will be a very low priority for Funcom. They will keep a handful of employees with AoC while all other work with Secret World. At that point Anarchy Online will be run by the office cleaning lady.
You seem new to this conversation.
Let me inform you of the situation. I'm not speaking of profits, losses, EBITs, expenses, or anything of the like. I'm simply focusing on Funcom's revenue as a reliable source of Funcom's subscription revenue and thus Age of Conan's subscription rate.
It is pretty simple. Just follow along.
Step 1: Funcom has, currently, only 3 relevant sources of revenue: Age of Conan Subscriptions, Age of Conan box sales, and Anarchy Online Subscriptions.
Step 2: Anarchy Online was, substantially, Funcom's only source of PC revenue for one or two years. This amount ranged from $800,000 to $1,200,000. In the grand scheme of subscription analysis, the variation is a drop in the bucket. For any analysis I do I stick the number at $1,000,000, which I believe is a reasonable estimate.
Step 3: Box sale/Direct Drive/Steam Revenue: I generally leave this at an insignificant number: 10,000 boxes every 3 months. I don't want to be accused of artificially boosting box revenue to skew subscription numbers down. Although ultimately if AoC is selling no new copies, the game is doomed.
Step 4: Now you are stuck with a number, divided by 3 months and by subscription revenue, which accurately describes Age of Conan's subscription total. Plutolife is done with and accounted for, as is described in Funcom's last quarterly report.
So sir, if you can't go to funcom.com and look in investor relations to find the last 3 years of quarterly reports, that is your own problem. As it stands, we have an accurate measure of Funcom's incoming revenue, based mostly on Age of Conan subscriptions. And if Funcom is getting a lot more money from box sales, the subscription situation is even worse...but I give AoC the benefit of the doubt just so I can detract naysayers such as yourself.
So I don't need to analyze any other numbers, although I could if needed. Funcom is a company that loaded itself with a bunch of long-term low-interest debt to arrive at the cash flow it currently has, because it certainly has never earned any portion of that. Stockholders and bondholders alike bought into the risk which is AoC, and that risk has blossomed into a 50-90% loss for original and recent stock purchasers and a capital loss for bondholders. And don't tell me how to read a balance sheet <edited, reposted> I'm a lawyer who has a $19,000,000+ trust account that needs to be reconciled weekly. I understand how to read a ledger.
Lit
Man I am glad that there is no Human wich know`s everything.
I mean if most Banks in the World, have a finance disaster, because the ones who learned the profession, were mistake.
I won t attack you Litigator, it`s most likely the case that you know more than I do about such matters....but well, why should I care? I like this game so I am playing it. The Subscriber`s are rising, they still have stock left.Ì don t have to Fear the Server will be shut up...I mean look at anarchy only, there still up.
Tell me, why should I care?
And so far all Lit's guesses have been wrong. So where does that leave Lit? lol.
Lit's previous post history have been very spot on. He have "guessed" the revenue numbers too precisly for it to be just guesses.
Even tho with the new faces we are seeing there is no denying the fact that DFO has taken people from AoC, so if AoC are gaining subscribers or simply replacing the ones they have lost to DFO and those who quit the game only time will tell. . If Funcom can't generate enough money they will either have to scrap certain products or they will be forced to close the door on the company. Which would be a loss to the MMO community as funcom is a company that does have the balls to not make a WoW clone.
I guess we will see the result in the report in May, hopefully they have managed to start earning some money on aoc again.
Playing: Battlefield - Bad company (Xbox360) Arma2, DFO (PC)
On my radar: TSW, MO
MMO's played: SWG (pre cu/cu), WoW, AoC, WAR, DFO, Planetside
MMO's that I have tested: Lotro, L2, Aion, Ryzom
I'm not an AoC player, but who pays for the 1-month sub price on any MMO anymore? I would assume that the 3 month sub price is about $13-$14 a month and the 6 month sub even less? So, the $15 month figure is always a tad unrealistic.
Also, keep in mind that FunCom had a revenue increase of about 33M over the past year. (investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp)
Now, if your talking about earnings (net profit) - yeah .. the company is being hit hard. They are now being taxed at a higher rate because of the increased revenue, they have a very large operations expense and have a bit of debt. 33M per year when spread between the government, payroll, operations, IT and creditors is not very much when you think about it.
There is much, much more on whether a company is sucessful or not than the product or service it sells.
This is a honest question. However I would remind the poster that Age of Conan has more than half of its servers in Europe. Europeans pay their subscription in Pounds and in Euros. And in both cases the price is far more than $15 US per month. Even with multi-month subscriptions the price is closer to $19 US a month.
I also would submit that the typical subscriber signs up month to month.
Lit I agree with your method of arriving at subscription numbers. However your data is outdated. Its from february when they guided 6-8 mill USD for 1q. This means we know what subscription numbers Funcom have predictet up to 31 March. Its old news. Its reflected in the stock price. Also, we dont know if they will come in over or under guidance. Probably they will come within that interval.
What is interresting is what they will guide for 2q, as we allready are 1 month into it. THAT will tell us on what is happening with subscription figures.
Another thing, please dont brag about reading balance sheets because you either havent understood Funcoms or you havent read it. Funcom has debt but they have even more cash. That means that they can pay their obligations and be debt free in an eyeblink.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Not only is this wrong it's absurd on the face of it. When is any source of revenue irrelevant? You're still just pulling numbers out of your ass whether you believe they are reasonable or not.
You ask when a source of revenue is irrelevant.
Answer: A source of company revenue is irrelevant when it does not change your analysis either way. That is, if you factor it in, your answer is the same as if you had not factored it in.
Context: Funcom has another source of revenue: The Dreamfall franchise. No doubt they probably earn some money from it still. However, am I going to factor that in just so I can adjust Age of Conan subscriptions from (whatever I calculate them to be) to (whatever I calculate them to be - 600?) Hardly. That makes it irrelevant. Understand?
And sorry zym, the numbers come from Funcom's own guidance. Funcom's own presentations.
Ace: I agree with you up until "its reflected in the stock price". Obviously its guidance was made in early February. That is the whole deal with prognosis and analysis...taking Funcom's guidance and extrapolating since then.
I have done the extrapolation. I think Funcom is going to end up within guidance. And that spells a decrease in subscribers from the Oct-Dec period to the Jan-March period.
And next quarter supporters of the game will call this quarter's guidance "old news". But eventually something has to give. If this game is going to survive it requires paid subscriptions to increase. It certainly won't be shown in this quarter's numbers. And at what point is "breaking even" just continued failure? 75,000 subscribers one quarter and 75,000 the next? At some point revenue has to start increasing or AoC development is going to be drastically slashed. They don't have that much longer.
I'm horrible at math and too poor to know any of that stock talk but Lit has been right about everything else I recall him posting about funcom numbers in the past.
I do though agree that if you enjoy playing the game and are having fun none of this should matter to you anyway continue to play and take solace in the fact that most mmos live reasonably long lives if you consider what SWG,MXO,COH/V and I'm sure others have went through but in that case this post shouldn't matter to you anyway.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Ace: I agree with you up until "its reflected in the stock price". Obviously its guidance was made in early February. That is the whole deal with prognosis and analysis...taking Funcom's guidance and extrapolating since then.
I have done the extrapolation. I think Funcom is going to end up within guidance. And that spells a decrease in subscribers from the Oct-Dec period to the Jan-March period.
And next quarter supporters of the game will call this quarter's guidance "old news". But eventually something has to give. If this game is going to survive it requires paid subscriptions to increase. It certainly won't be shown in this quarter's numbers. And at what point is "breaking even" just continued failure? 75,000 subscribers one quarter and 75,000 the next? At some point revenue has to start increasing or AoC development is going to be drastically slashed. They don't have that much longer.
I think Funcom basically is admitting they had a pretty significant drop in subscribers going into the 1st quarter.. why else would they give guidance for 25% decrease in revenues.
As far as stock price goes... You can easily say the stock price is too high considering the rapid decline expected in revenues coming from AOC.. and that would be correct... but TSW is starting to get talked about, so some of the share price of Funcom right now is anticipation of the launch of TSW. Where does the decline in revenue from AOC intersect with the hype being built for TSW?
At some point in the next 6 months, the revenues of AOC and AO will be insignificant compared to the hype for TSW when evaluating the stock price... that's just the way companies with very few products work.
I don't think anyone but a fanboy or a paid employee will claim the game is growing. Quite the contrary. Overall web traffic has been back on a downward trend since the january server merge spike and the free trial spike. It has been running at pre December levels for the last couple of weeks. Looks as if the trial version not generating enough new to make up for those on their way out the door. Their web forum advertising campaign is still strong though .
I miss DAoC
I am pretty sure that AoC is experiencing a slow growth at the moment. The main indicator is xfire, but there are several other indicators. Namely forums, share price, and campaign activities. (please lets not discuss which ones are good or bad, they are all bad indicators imo)
Another thing is that Funcom said in February that the number of players had stabilized. This combined with the activities and stable interrest leads me to conclude that theres a slow growth.
Now - you can say i fall into the category "fanboy" so you can predict my answer. Well anyways, my 2c.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
I can't tell you if the game is growing or shrinking, and I don't know what their quarterly or annual numbers are. All I know is that after having resubbed 2 weeks ago I am having an awesome time. The game has done a 180 since I cancelled during my free 30 days last June. I haven't had this much fun since the early days of SWG.
I am pretty sure that AoC is experiencing a slow growth at the moment. The main indicator is xfire, but there are several other indicators. Namely forums, share price, and campaign activities. (please lets not discuss which ones are good or bad, they are all bad indicators imo)
Another thing is that Funcom said in February that the number of players had stabilized. This combined with the activities and stable interrest leads me to conclude that theres a slow growth.
Now - you can say i fall into the category "fanboy" so you can predict my answer. Well anyways, my 2c.
I won't call you fanboy but I can see where you have never done any statistical analysis either.
if you are going to quote Xfire you can only use the numbers from the Xfire contest on in which case it has fallen. Forums are part of the web traffic which has been on a steady decline since post sever merge surge. Srock price has nothing to do with anything at all except optimism and in FC's case the company is worth almost as much dead and liqudated as it is alive at this point.
If there was slow growth as you put it the website traffic would mirror that. I can look at nothing more than a chart with website traffic numbers and point out every patch day, the free trial start, the server merge, the Xfire contest etc etc. Flatten the peaks and valleys and you can see a gradual downward trend. Now while probably less than 10% of the players ever visit the website on a regular basis you can monitor population trends simply because that less than percentage will fairly constant be whether the game has 100K players or 800K players or is moving between those extremes.
In simple terms if the game has 800k players and 10% of those visit the web site once a day then the site would get 80K hits, the game declines to 100K players then the site gets 10K hits,. It's a bit more complicated than that but you should see what I mean
I miss DAoC
Jackdog, first of all i tried to make it clear that i had no good figures to make any calculations. I actually do know (or did when i whent to business school) about statiscial analysis. One thing is clear, we do not have any good data source. The best we have is actually xfire, whic is crap. (please read again, xfire is crap, but the other tools are even worse)
I rely heavily on indications, there is no clear trend! That means that in best case AoC is slowly increasing its number of subs. I could be wrong, but all the "hi i am back and loving it" posts on eu, us and mmorpg forums, gives me an optimisitc feeling. I am guessing their numbers are growing SLOWLY. Its just that the genreal tone is overly positive at the moment, i cant be that bad with all the good feedback from the small ammount of poster.
Had there been a clear trend we would have seen all indicators climb, but as you correctly point out, the web traffic is flat (guessing alexa here) except from peaks during special events. So, no proof, but lots of indications. Thats what I have based my conclusion at the moment untill somebody proves me wrong. (woudl love that by the way, i dont like to rely on indications)
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
So what are you using for your base figure, Xfire numbers at launch, Xfire numbers pre December when the fanboys or Funcom employees posing as fanboys begged on the forums for players to install Xfire so as to artificaly inflate the numbers, or are you using the Xfire numbers pre contest or the did you just start with post contest Xfire numbers which introduced a few thousand AoC players to Xfire for the first time?
Instead try using the web page data which is much harder to manipulate because of the sheer volume of page hits and you can go all the way back to launch. Just this quarter it has dropped another 15% which is better than last quarter where it dropped over 30% and the second quarter after launch where it dropped 50%
It also tells quite a few other things such as that the game is wildly popular in Norway and Germany with the United Kngdom and Spain not far behind. In France, Italy, Sweden and Belgium quite a few people like it and it is more popular in Canada than it is in the US. In Mexico and Russia it is quite low on the web totem pole however.
I can also assume with some degree of accuracy that the average AoC player is male, some college, 18 - 34 years old, has no children, and is browsing from home.
I miss DAoC