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TSW sales and subscriptions
QSatu
Member UncommonPosts: 1,796
Maybe some of you will find it interesting:
http://www.funcom.com/investors/the_secret_world_update
Sorry if it's been already posted. Close it if there is another thread about it.
Comments
I'm quite surprised, the guys at Funcom are using sources like Metacritic and MMORPG.com for evaluating the success of their product. Metacritic has only 40+ critic reviews and 280+ user reviews for TSW, can this really be considered a valid source of information?
I always thought that these companies would be investing some money on market analysis and stuff like that, but reading an "Investor relations" article with those poor analysis is quite shocking...
Example:
"Funcom is pleased to see that gamer satisfaction is high, with user score of 8.4 out of 10 and higher on www.metacritic.com and other sites like mmorpg.com." So having 286 people voting in metacritic is something representative of their user base?
Using Metacritic as a reference is quite acceptable, given that it's a completely independant source which is widely used. If Funcom had comissioned their own survey, the results would have been "questionable", because any survey that they pay for may have been manipulated in one way or another.
I'm not surprised to see that TSW does not meet their expectations, because I always thought their Q1 projections were very optimistic. TSW is not a mainstream game, and it wasn't massively advertised. The latter is probably a blessing, because if it sold a million boxes at launch, the "user satisfaction" score on Metacritic may well have been considerably lower.
I just hope that the game can remain successful enough to provide those that love it an opportunity to continue playing it.
You didn't post the entire quote. They are using Metacritic and MMORPG.com as an external metric. They were saying that the external user metrics matched their internal metrics from beta testers and players.
They were also talking about the stock price, which was the point of the released information. Public ratings on the game will apparently have an impact on the price of their stock, which is what investors are concerned with. The professional reviewers of the game did not score the game as high as Funcom expected. The professional reviews were certainly not as favorable as the user reviews.
I'm more interested in this quote:
If this removes the subscription, I'll probably buy the game and play it. It probably means they are laying people off, but I can hope.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
It is if that is the entirety of the userbase.
/zing
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
The retention page says nothing about retention.
Also if they're using this site as a indicator for retention they should realize that that one thread about retention showed that like 50% of the people playing were resubbing.
Interesting read. Their stocks fall sharply after the release of TSW, they attribute it to the metacritic scores. The one thing that might make sense of that is the what they mention next. Because its a new IP it needs to take off well.
Whats more interesting is this part: "Funcom has on several occasions presented two financial scenarios for the first 12 months following launch of the game; please refer to page 17 in the 1Q 2012 presentation *). Funcom does not consider it likely that either of them will be met. "
If you look at those two scenarios they basically go like this:
Target Scenario
They expect to sell less than 500k clients in the first 12 months.
Even though their sales are pretty low and their subs are below 280k projected over the first year they feel positive that if they keep the quality high enough they can mantain profitability.
"A possible scenario going forward is that the game will sell less than both of the two above mentioned scenarios the first 12 months following launch, but with high customer satisfaction, it will generate a more stable subscriber base than the game Age of Conan. Over time, this will enable Funcom to retain more customers and generate higher revenue."
All in all I think this game is going f2p sooner than expected. They are right now banking on customer retention instead of getting more customers. Unfortunately with lower profit I can't see how they keep producing high quality content at a high pace. And we know that within 3-6 months MMOs tend to bleed more subs.
BTW I don't think going f2p or b2p is a bad thing. I think it will open the doors for this game and increase their profits.
It is a shame, but yes, a game based on no known IP do suffers a big impact based on "proffessional" reviews, and far too many of those have given mediocre ratings, even tho player reviews are between 8 and 9 points out of 10.
The impact of this could cripple on the long run a good game with a lot of potential, which would be a big shame.
Well, this is not particularly surprising.
The stock has collapsed 66% since mid-April, and is down over 50% today to a new 52-week low on huge volume. I tend to think stock action telegraphs bad news, and this news is bad.
Still, I'd like to see them somehow salvage this game since some of the ideas behind it were quite good.
"Loading screens" are not "instances".
Your personal efforts to troll any game will not, in fact, impact the success or failure of said game.
I think this may be a blessing in disguise for them. Not having the large rush of preorders come in allowed them to have a successful, stable launch which will help with customer retention and their reputation going forward. They also don't have to worry about the problems caused by the massive crash that other big MMO's have suffered.
I always saw this game as more of a niche title that has the potential to grow over time rather than dying a painful death like so many other MMOs. Kinda that saying: "you're either growing or you're dying." I think I would rather be slowly growing than quickly dying like most MMOs.
Right now they should be focused on retaining as many of their subscribers as possible before they look to expand and bring in new players. Showing that the game has a stable and strong community will be their best asset going forward and could allow them to see positive growth over the next year. I think it is a blessing not to have been inundated with the nomadic MMO community that wants to play the next best thing for a week and then trash it to move on to the next.
Unless they meet their needed numbers, it's no blessing whatsoever, instead of being bashed for a bug ridden launch the haters will simply say that the game was bad and tanked. Which is not the case.
Less money than expected also means less money to reinvest and puts a problem with their model of monthly updates, as they basically need to be in constant developmetn phase for it.
I find it very odd how the "pro" reviews are so much lower than the averages of player reviews, specially on sites that have given high scores to game that players hated and scored low: however those high "pro" scores pushed the intital sales by contributing to the hype.
Here's my take.
Around the time I first stumbled upon the secret world and after getting a firm understanding of the design philosophy. I made statments like,
March 14th 2012 MMO-C TSW mega thread.
"No I do not want the masses flocking over there screaming quest are too hard. Screaming for all, that they wont take the time to earn. I want the game to be a secret. The casual newbie generation has WoW, SW:TOR, and soon GW2.
The secret world does not need 10 million of the new generation of rpgrs that don't now what a D-3 is let alone character generation. Yes I wish the game would remain a secret letting those who followed the intro ARG for years help the game develop."
500k sounded just about right for launch growing to about 900k over the year. As time rolled along CB started. The excitement in those forums and the felling of a tight nitt community was like nothing I've seen before. The game had delivered on it's design philosophy. Then the ads came, and more gamers got a whiff of what the game was, what I and others wanted for the game slowy changed. I felt that a game this good and this true to the core values of Role Playing Games needed to be rewarded, and I still do. That 500k grew to possiblities of a million at launch. The game is that good. That rich in detail and systems.
So not reaching 1 million yet? Yeah it's dissapointing. The game deserves it. However 400-500k at launch is inline with my initial hopes and expectations, and growing to 900k one year after launch is not out of the question. The game is too good not to grow.
inb4 BC you just said you thought there would be 800k!@ I was wrong
I hope the above explains why.
You understand that its not 400k-500k at launch. They expect less than 500k through the first year. Right now we know that active players are less than 280k and they expect that it will stay that way through the first year. Unless they go f2p or b2p I don't see how they would get more than 1M or even close.
What I did was put what you deduced in red. Then highlighted why you may be in error depending on the context of the yellow, which I attempt to frame in yellow below.
You deduced from projection of sales that retention was low, and that subs were less than 280k. In the orange Funcom speaks specifically to sales.
From the large type in the last paragraph it looks like retention is much higher than AoC.
The majority of those who have played the game rate the game highly as seen on metacritic and mmorpg. There are just not enough people who have played. This looks like a marketing issue more so than a game issue.
The thing that should be most concerning is that this can impact development cycles and game support. The stock was over $20 NOK ($3.40 US) in mid-April 2012 and has plummeted to $3.75 NOK ($.63 US) today. The impacts the company's ability to raise money through stock offerings.
Additionally, such a significant miss means that they will need to re-evaluate the entire operating budget. This could lead to layoffs, cutbacks, decreases in marketing, longer development times for new content, a decreased quality of content, and so on. I'm not saying these things are happening, we just don't know. But we do know in general what happens when revenue comes in at 50% of projections.
Now they could "double-down" and sink a ton of money into fixing bugs, developing content, and addressing all of the other issues highlighted by consumers, and then sink money into marketing and ask reviewers to re-evaluate their game in 3 months. I'm not sure how they responded to the AoC launch but I don't think it was in this way.
There is no way to spin this as positive.
"Loading screens" are not "instances".
Your personal efforts to troll any game will not, in fact, impact the success or failure of said game.
I did not deduce their retention was low, as a matter of fact like you mention they say its good. What I do deduce and that is a plain fact if you read what they said, that they have less than 280k subs. How do you know this? because they clearly state that they do NOT expect to meet their two scenarios. One of those was having at least 280k subs. Having a low number of subs does not mean low retention.
There are two plain facts you can read from this. They do NOT expect to sell more than 500k and they do NOT expect to have 280k subs in the first 12 months.
"A possible scenario going forward is that the game will sell less than both of the two above mentioned scenarios the first 12 months following launch, but with high customer satisfaction, it will generate a more stable subscriber base than the game Age of Conan. Over time, this will enable Funcom to retain more customers and generate higher revenue."
All you can duduce is that the game has less than half of 1million+ subs. Your mixing projected retention with projected sales to get to your 280k number.
Now we are only talking about plus or minus 220k subs, but far as what you deduced there is a possible margin of error of near 50% in total numbers.
What makes you think they base their success in the reviews? salesis the thing. What they presented is that the underwhelming aggregated scores from reviews (metacritic is good place to check for this) have impacted their sales negatively.
They should add also that their weak marketing efforts are more than likely a big factor there, too. they went the opposite route than with AoC and instead of producing hype let the lauch come without building up. They obtain very good player reviews, but sadly they didn't get enough buyers hooked at launch to meet their expectations.
That is true, however they sold more than 700K mil at launch for AoC, and the poor retention didn't really started until after some time. it all depends on how they are making the comparisons.
My take. Fucking awful news.
Next week's demo at Gamescom better have the whole industry talking or it will be a problem.
Which is a shame. TSW didn't deserve the majority of those low scores. The game has its faults, but it certainly isn't a 71, when comparing to other AAA MMOs ratings. It actually matches the user scores and MMORPG's score.
It is, what it is. Hopefully they'll go B2P and start pushing stuff to the cash shop, rather than lay people off - as mentioned above.
As a Single Player game TSW is a great game but it's MMO elements are very lacking. I am all for solo friendly game play but dev's need to find ways to create incentives for players to group up into both small short term groups and longer term larger groups if they want people to stick around more than a few months.
I expect the B2P/F2P noise from Funcom is still a few months out.