Age of Conan

Originally posted by jusomdude

Originally posted by Antarious

Originally posted by Banok

AGAIN

who cares about subscriber numbers!

we are players not stock holders. we are players and should care about game play. and the reviews prove its a incomplete but very fun game.

 

They need a minimum number of subscribers to:

1) operate the game and make a profit

2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development

3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.

4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.

oh and

5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.

They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.

It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.

Not true.  500k x $50 = 25Mil.  Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
 

Originally posted by Grunties

Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.

 

Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!

Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.

If revenue enough to rival first world nations'  revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few  games  capable of selling 100,000 copies.

I can vouch for two that wont be subbing and have quit before the free time is up, giving funcom plenty of cancel time so there wont be any "mistakes"  (grin)

-2 Funcom 

Originally posted by checkthis500

Originally posted by jusomdude

Originally posted by Antarious

Originally posted by Banok

AGAIN

who cares about subscriber numbers!

we are players not stock holders. we are players and should care about game play. and the reviews prove its a incomplete but very fun game.

 

They need a minimum number of subscribers to:

1) operate the game and make a profit

2) the 'profit' won't be a profit at first as they have to pay off the cost of development

3) They borrowed at least $30 million from outside the company that also has to be paid back.

4) obviously the number of subscribers matters.. if you can't understand why yet.. then there is no hope.

oh and

5) I make no attempt to claim they have any paticular number of subscribers (high or low) I was just trying to answer your question as to why it would matter.

They already made that 30 mil back on box sales. Plus if they keep half the purchased boxes as subscribers they'll be making 3.75 mil a month, minus their operating costs which I hope aren't anywhere near 3.75 mil a month.

It's already passed the first month since release and I still see plenty of players online.

Not true.  500k x $50 = 25Mil.  Math FTW. (Assuming they sold half of the 1Mil shipped boxes)
 

its even less than that i found nowhere exact numbers how much of the money of the boxsales the gamecompany gets in pc games, but for consoles there is this:

http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_rr_game06_1219expensivegames_slide.html?thisSpeed=20000

for pc games there is no console owners fee, but i guess retail, packaging and such numbers will probably be simmilar. this shows that a developer only really gets about 50% of the costs as money to cover the developement costs. so that means they will need over a million boxes sold to recover 30 million from box sales alone.

Originally posted by Bronks

Originally posted by Grunties

Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.

 

 

Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!

 

Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.

If revenue enough to rival first world nations'  revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few  games  capable of selling 100,000 copies.

yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).

anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.

Originally posted by quaiky

Originally posted by Bronks

Originally posted by Grunties

Blizzard is likely funneling most of its profit into development on other games. We already know about diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and the latest WoW expansion. They probably wont make any more major moves with WoW than that because they have no problem keeping subs or getting new ones. The squeeky wheel gets the grease, they arent going to burn money if they don't have to.

 

 

Seriously man: 10,000,000 subscribers x $15/month = $150,000,000 PER MONTH!!!!

 

Blizzard should have conceptualized and designed EVERY PC game released over the past 3 years with resources like this.

If revenue enough to rival first world nations'  revenue can't put out more than Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Burning Crusade and Lich King, they should send 1% my way and I'm pretty sure I could hire a bunch of hotshot game design grads to make me a few  games  capable of selling 100,000 copies.

 

yes most of blizzards profit is just profit. no company is spending more than 100 millions on a single game developement, and for a company to spend that much they must allready be sure that its a multi million seller. gta4 cost roughly 100 million devcosts for both consoles combined and is currently the most expensive game overall. to recover such costs you have to sell more than 3 million games which only very few games do. its likely that starcraft 2 and diablo 3 will reach more than this numbers but even with that its very unreasonable to spend more money than that, even if you make about that much money from wow monthly (which is not completely sure cause noone knows how much the monthly costs to run the game are, and cause subscription system in asia works different and most people there more likely don't pay 15$ a month).

anyway blizzard and especially their owners & stock holders are making money left and right, and it doesn't really matter to me if its 50 millions a month or 100 millions a month just from subscriptions.

FYI the developers get around a third of the box price back, and around half of the subscription amount is operation costs.

Based on the following factors during my time in the game (I was in-game a lot during this time as part of it coincided with a week off work so I got to see the situation at all times of day) I think we will be stretching it to say that 25% of the initial subscribers actually stayed:

The guild I was in and that of a friend, all of which had over 30 players near release were both virtually dead by the time I left , only 1-2 people logged on per day in the guild I was in. One guildmate left to join another guild and he was worried by the lack of the other players logging back in - most of them stopped just before paid subscription. The leader of my guild gave up on AoC and went back to lotro just after subscriptions kicked in.

The number of instances both in the higher level and lower level areas (I played both my 68 main and several alts from levels 5-28 a lot) has dropped dramatically a lot of zones dont even go over one instance spawned. Tortage is one of the few places that still has a few players running around (nowhere close to what was at release), this is probably the die-hard players rolling alts due to the recent class balancing.

OOC and region chat channels had hit near virtual silence the majority of the time on my server. As was noted by someone else on these forums I was actually receiving less goldspam before the end (even the goldsellers seem to be giving AoC up as a bad job).

The number of disgruntled players, goodbye posts and goodbye messages on the forums and from friends in-game.

Difficulty finding groups at all levels. The introduction of the grey-elite fixes also stopped bored players helping out their friends in lower level instances and cut down on farming to fund guild city production.

Lack of players visible when riding from the main cities through to some of the later zones. The game actually felt less crowded while riding through zones and past major mob camps.

This game had some great ideas and if Funcom had stuck to their guns and delivered the game promised it would flourish but they seem bent on destroying what they have already rather than fixing it. Im hopeful that in time it will be worth returning to, but I will be damned if I will pay them while they fix this beta title. I also dont believe that at its current rate of decline that this game will be viable at all in 6 months, never mind a future 360 release. Funcom needs a serious wake-up call.

I'd guess it was obvious to most of us in alpha/beta that AOC was nowhere ready for release.  Unfortunately this seems to be the case for almost every MMORPG these days.  Companies can't afford to wait, however, sometimes, so they wind up balancing their desire to earn enough revenue to keep running with their desire to present the best product available.