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Did Funcom spend too much money on advertising?
Xenosaiyan
Member Posts: 215
IMO
Well all know Age of Conan isn't a good game, yet it started out so well. Instead of completing the game, did they spend the rest of their funds on advertising, and the subscriptions would all them to complete the game later on? People always say, "This game is incomplete"
Comments
The game was boring
I don't think it failed. I think it let us down in places but its definately not out for the count. OP you might want to put an "in my opinion" in there somewhere.
the reason why age of conan failed is , the lack of experience of it's developper team, many experienced devloppers that worked at funcom for AO, left the company inthe middle of aoc developement, they replaced them with new ones, that had lesser experience or none, what made the game struggle for years and it's release pushed 4 times for 2 years, the graphic engine is a mess, sure it looks good, but have way too many probleme, they cant even optimize the game correctly in term of performance even 3 months after the release, shaders gestion, and alot of other crap.
just look at every single patch made by funcom for the game, i mean how bad they could be, to not be able to make a real fixe,without creating bigger mess, it's either dev lack experience or they don't have enough ppl for the amount of problemes they have, could be also project director who do his job badly and set wrong objectif, or manage badly his teams.
anyway this have nothing to do with ads or other shit.
just FailCom
Couple comments:
@ Amazing Avery, obviously it's his opinion. I didn't see any links. Do you think anyone will read any post here and take it as fact?
@ OP, I may be wrong but a project like an MMO is huge. They don't just have a pile of money and say go to it guys! There would be clear and hashed over budgets for every aspect months before production even starts I'm sure.
Marketing, development, art, media relations, coordinators..etc. I doubt the case was:
Devs: "Hey we need some funds to finish the PvP system for release."
Accounts Payable guy: "Ohh...sorry, the marketing guys spent it last week on a naked chick banner ad on MMORPG, sorry."
EDIT: @ Xemous, that sig owns man!
Hyping. They spent too much time and money hyping the game. There is a subtle difference. Advertising is promoting something that is in your game and working. Hyping is twisting the facts so you can make as much money as possible without any moral or ethical qualms.
this may be the most overly stupid thing you have said yet. take your head of the sand. they
promised pvp. it was suppose to be a pvp game. it launched with a completely broken pvp
system. hell can't even say it was broken because it wasn't there. this game is a failure.
i wan't my 65 dollars back dammit.
<img src='http://lotrosigs.level3.turbine.com/0320200000031cd29/signature.png'></img>;
Worst MMO I have ever played, unfinished, boring, no customer service, grind, no direction, no itemization, aweful patches, charging CC early, did I mention half the game missing?
Wouldn't have anything to do with Funcom or one of their products again and I want my $50 back.
What I have noticed is there is not as much advertising as I saw the month of release and leading up to it. Maybe this is standard for MMO's as I have never paid to much attention to it, but I would think if the game was doing well they would continue to advertise and maybe have some T.V commercials in the works.
Just my Opinion
MMO advertising is much like the movie business. You hype and build for release, keep it up till it's not a new release, then you cull the budget for advertising and rely on word of mouth and media/forums. Movies have Blu-Ray sales as well, MMOs have new customers and retention for long term viability.
I think over the course of say 1997 - now that has been fairly standard. To advertise a few months to maybe a year after release. I mean I remember seeing ads for UO or EQ when they were in development and first launched then they kinda went away.
WoW is perhaps the most heavily advertised MMO ever. I mean there are so many places where you can go in and see WoW trials... Honestly I think it plays a large part to them retaining the numbers they have. By that I mean people quit but others take their place etc
EvE I have started to see doing a lot of advertising lately.. even having commectials I've seen on the Sci-Fi channel and I believe they have seen a decent increase in players as well.
I honestly don't see much for other games..
SOE games are advertised in Beckit Massive or however, you spell it.. but I always have felt that SOE is tied into that mag somehow anyway.
Personally I thought AoC launched decently compared to most MMO launches.. it was the total lack of direction and random changes after launch that killed it quickly for me. Advertising won't help you when that is going on..
If they had fixed priortity or what should have been priority things first... instead of the random boost, nerf.. ignore broken things... it might have worked out better.
PvP obviously wasn't where it needed to be or working.
Many class abilites didn't work and probably still don't.
Attack speed differences
Quests that were broken
Hell the entire month +free days for pre-order .. I was trying to finish that Pyramid quest on at least one toon.. that thing was still not updating when my time ran out. That's just sad..
Oh lol so no I don't think they spent to much on advertising..
They didn't spend enough time actually looking at what was wrong and making a logical plan to fix it.
The reason for failure, his name is Gaute 'There will be no camping in Shadowlands' Godager.
Looking at the current product, I think a few tings brought AOC down. Bad focus is the maind reason.
They focused on all the wrong stuff. Graphics over GUI usage. Polished newby zone instead of polished PvP. Untested features like (such as the combo system in PvP). Basically their goals shoudl have been to make a complete playable game, not work on making their graphics over the top. why is there voice acting in the game anyways? this game only needed 25% of its voice acting for the primary quest. However ALL of tortage has voice acting, which makes it obvious that the whole game was intended to have voice acting. This leads to my next failure.
Money. The game released at only 60% complete due to money. Investers wanted to see results now. So Funcom had to release early. Funcom would of had a good chunk still in their budget if they didn't spend so much on voice acting and audio editing.
Lastly are newby employees. What hurts most is not replacing 1 or 2 guys but replace much of your staff. Rumor has it that much of the original staff left the game including programmers. So some newby programmers had to go through the nightmare of optimizing the graphics engine. Ends up that only led to memory leaks.
I'm sure there are a ton more factors, like funcoms inability to design a decent customer support system.
You know, this is actually a valid point the OP brings up (albeit, it being a failure is clearly an opinion... with some hint of factual evidence). At any rate, it's interesting he brings up advertising and marketting.
For the longest time Funcom was more or less silent about the game. I mean, we went a whole year once without so much as a word about the game... and don't get me started on the screenshots which would come out two at a time every four-five months.
It wasn't until January of this year that you even heard much about the game. I mean, you didn't see anything about AoC until earlier this year, and then right before it went live, you couldn't go to a game-site and not see something about it.
So... my guess is that they really blew their load on AoC and advertising. I mean, they could have handled this a little better. Up until January, no one knew anything about the game, except for those who "knew about it". It's hard to explain, but if you think about it's popularity before January and it's popularity after... it's like a complete night and day difference.
I speculate that if they had broadcast more about the game throughout its developement, word of mouth would have gotten around a lot better and a lot more. Thus, they wouldn't have had to shotgun pellet their money on advertising for consumer interest to rise on a game that wasn't ready for launch. And they could have spent the extra marketing money on keeping the game in development longer.
This is just how I see it though...
why would he have to do that? pretty sure just about every single post on these forums is everyones opinion. only the clueless would look at all our posts as pure fact. for them well i wouldnt want to spell it out for them every time i make a post.
Head Joint SoundCloud Page
https://soundcloud.com/headjointambient1
Lack of talent and Bagdad Gaute.
very bad game period
Why did AOC fail? Because of a deceitful Dev team that didn't hit their stride before the development capital dried up.
Erling E did it for me. That last interview with mmorpg just made him look so bad. They might have a good marketing team, but Erling just undid all their hard work in 5 minutes flat.
Oh and appart from all the bad customer support issues the game has and no end content, missing content.... bug bugs bugs.....
List goes on too many to note.
this may be the most overly stupid thing you have said yet. take your head of the sand. they
promised pvp. it was suppose to be a pvp game. it launched with a completely broken pvp
system. hell can't even say it was broken because it wasn't there.
Gotta agree here. The game was heavily advertized as the next gen PvP game. Yet lets face it...FC hardly looked at the PvP. PvP lvls n all should have been there at launch. FC made a great lookin game, very well done lvls 1-20....and they got just plain LAZY. Spent all their funds on looks n advertizing failing to finish and properly test their game.
I remember last November when the launch was delayed...the game was ready...but they decided to postpone to polish/fix the game. Clearly they just needed a few more months of hype and nobody worked too hard on the game.
They didn't market the game.. they lied. End of story.
Nike markets their sneakers.... McDonalds markets their menu and prices.
What Funcom did was the equivelent of Nike doing an advertisment, but then after you open the box, all that is inside is a pair of Walmart flip-flops.
I think their marketing and advertising was a huge success. It resulted in 700k players going out and buying the game. The game itself probably resulted in half a million of those players cancelling in bewilderment at what was advertised.
Be interested in peoples (also Avery's) thoughts on how this game is not a total failure to its player base.
The amount of money spent is not relevant. Marketing budgets are usually a percentage of expected revenue or overall development budget and will be spent on as many media as possible.
The problem is that the Marketeers successfully hyped up a sensation (thats their job) which unfortunatly was attached to a game that was not able to meet that expectation.
Not many games meet the the hype of the marketting but if you tell the world you are next-gen, you better have something to back it up, if only to buy you time.
To err is human....to play is divine
You should rephrase it as we all know Age of Conan is not good game at end level due lack of content.
Even the bigest haters left due lack of content and few very annoying bugs and client stability, but overall game is very good and fun.
Futilez[Do You Have What It Takes ?]
I dont think they really had to spend anything on advertising other then what they spend on shills and mmorpg.com ad space. they mostly used thier fans and beta testers as their free advertisers....
Head Joint SoundCloud Page
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i also disagree that it failed
maybe it failed in fulfilling all the expectatuions or it failed in providing a constant stream of content after launch to keep the hardcore gamers but i still think of conan as a good mmo.
as for the money flow in relation to the update process
lets believe fc and say they sold 1mil boxes initially, lets say that 20% = 200k players stuck and pay 12$/month. for an outsider like me that looks like as if funcom should swim in money.
12x200.000 makes over a mil monthly from subscribers
the problem is that if 75% = 750.000$ goes into servers, support and marketing that leaves 250.000$ to pay the team to fix the bugs, bring in new content and improve the game.
im not sure what the average game developer/ artist gets payed but if its around or under 5.000$ they could maintain a team of 50 people (pure speculation)
the speed of the update process does not indicate they have that much manpower.
if i see that small bugs like an npc reacting to a quest takes weeks to fix id say they have rather 10 then 50 or even 100 people working on the game as they should.
on the other hand i dont know if its only an issue of throwing money (hiring more staff) because the original code could be screwed or the market for programmers with the neccessary skills could be empty.
its always easier to put 10 untrained people into support or to spend money on advertising then to actually find experts that fit into the team to allow real improvement of the game
if your bored, visit my blog at:
http://craylon.wordpress.com/ dealing with the look of mmos with the nvidia 3d vision glasses