(Author’s Note: News article published August 15, 2012)
The Secret World underperformance hits Funcom’s stock value
In an update to investors, Funcom has revealed that its latest MMO, The Secret World, has not been as successful as expected with blame being shifted on the aggregate review score it received.
The update comes a little over a month after the MMO launched on July 3. During that time the company’s stock has decreased, a fact it attributes to the game’s 72 review score average on Metacritic. Due to the game’s average reception and performance, the company now feels that initial financial projections will not be met.
In response to the lower-then-expected sales, a spokesperson said, “Funcom is currently enhancing distribution by launching the game on the Steam platform as well as focusing on key areas for improvement of the game and on-going activities on content updates, sales initiatives, and communication.”
Despite these initiatives, the company is not expecting the best results. Instead, according to one scenario, it predicts that “sales for the first 12 months following launch will be less than half of what was presented in the ‘Conan-like’ scenario.” This means that sales projections could be around 500,000 for the first month compared to the 1 million sales projection for the referenced scenario (a more positive outlook on sales projected a 30 percent increase over the 1 million sales).
However, The Secret World has lower operational costs compared to Age of Conon and the company “is currently implementing several cost-adjustment initiatives due to the expected lover initial revenues from The Secret World to secure future positive cash flows.”
Yet, while less-than-stellar review scores and poor word-of-mouth might attribute to the MMO’s lukewarm reception, the game also requires customers to pay a $15 monthly subscription fee. A feature that is one of the reasons for Star Wars: The Old Republic’s decline in subscription numbers and causing some to wonder what it did wrong.
