Funcom share price drops – Video Games Update
Funcom has revealed in an Investor update that the share price of the game developer and publisher has fallen ever since the launch of the Secret World on PC.
The Secret World is yet another massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) role playing game (RPG) developed by Funcom and published by Electronic Arts. Surprisingly the MMO is not free to play and features a subscription model.
The game got an average reception at launch while getting an average review score of 73 percent on Metacritic.com from an aggregate of 27 reviews. Funcom is blaming Metacritic for the poor reception of the game and has revealed that it might not meet the
target subscriptions required to turn over a profit. Funcom has reported that its share price has started to drop slowly since The Secret World was released on July 3, 2012.
Because of the poor initial launch sales, Funcom is bringing the game on Steam so that more gamers will become aware of the MMO. "A possible scenario going forward is that the game will sell less, [...] but with high customer satisfaction, it will generate
a more stable subscriber base than Age of Conan. Over time, this will enable Funcom to retain more customers and generate higher revenue," states the Funcom report regarding the current status of the game.
On the bright side, people who have purchased the game and are paying the subscriptions have given positive reviews to the game and claim that its quite fun even though it could use a little tweaks here and there. The average user score for the game on Metacritic
is 8.4 which is quite impressive for an MMO. Funcom is hoping for things to turn around and the player base for the MMO to rise because of positive user reviews for the game and word of mouth.
Considering the current trend with MMOs, it is surprising to see that Funcom has not expected this MMO to completely flop because of the subscription based model. If Funcom doesn’t have a free to play model ready as a backup, just in case this MMO also bombs
like every other before it except for World of Warcraft (WOW), the Secret World might die out very quickly.
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