Facts:
- Andrè Backen quits his job as boss for Funcom after 9 years in the position, but continues in another position within the company.
- The news agency Origo claims AO has 115.000 subscribers worldwide.
- Public Relations boss Marit Lund gets layed off along with 19 other persons.
- Funcom programmer finds weaknesses with Telenors (Norways tele-giant) new DSL system where you pay a monthly fee for x amounts of gigabytes downloaded each month.
- Europes Routing server company goes bankrupt, europe is routed through USA for about another month, europe is stuck with a lame connection, like surfing on a 14.4 modem using DSL.
Questions:
- 115.000 subscribers, 12$ a month, monthly income of $1.380.000
If the numbers are right, and the numbers have been stable through the last year, the total production cost of AO should have been payed off by us the players by now.
During the last year, considering we've payed somewhere around $16.500.000, what have we gotten in return?
Yes, we got servers to play on.
Yes, we got bug fixes and class balancing, if you want to call it that.
But, content wise, what have we gotten?
I do think it's right to compare AO with other online games, I will compare it with Asheron's Call as that is the game I know best.
In short terms, each and every month we got a huge load of content added to the game, which was part of the monthly fee.
Now step back to AO, they announce the launch of an add-on making us able to control lands with towers and organizations, Yay! finally some content, the drawback, we have to pay for it.
About 6-8 months after the release of this add-on pack, the "huge" add-on pack, Shadowlands, will be released, here too, the players must pay for content.
With the launch of about 8-10 new online games within a year from now, how does Funcom hope to retain 115.000 paying customers, I don't know, honestly, I don't Funcom does either.
The control land add-on pack was given to us because the Shadowlands expansion pack was delayed, it will be released to give us something in the mean time, while waiting.
But is it right to charge the players for it, is it right to charge the players more for content?
Yes to a certain degree, the Shadowlands expansion pack I would pay for if I were playing AO at the release of it, but this small add-on pack I think not.
Just another attempt to empty our wallets while Funcom employees focuses on finding weaknesses in other companies software instead of their own?
The unfortunate bankrupcy of the European routing server company does not make this any better, playing AO, who already has bad lag, now with a constant ping of 2K-5K, 10 seconds it takes to open a bag, or to sit down.
All in all, knowing now you will play Anarchy-Online with an insanely high ping, and then have to pay more money to have some fun in the game, considiring you like PvP, as that is what the add-on focuses on, well, are you considiring it as an viable option to other games about to be released?
The bad connection will ofcourse be as bad in any game as in AO, but during the month it will take to fix this, european players will play less, and some may lose interest of coming back.
I will play the game until the add-on pack is released, as I do not want to pay for it, I will move on to AC 2 open beta when the AO land control add-on pack is out, the next month ingame will be spent on slowly saying goodbye to a very good, but content less, online game.
There's no reason to focus as much on playing now as it was earlier with the current connection we have, this is not Funcom's fault, but unfortunate indeed.
Yes, you can have my stuff when I leave in about a month.
Ezeel, 156 Engineer, RK2.