Predicting what is going to happen to the Western MMO market in 2013 seems a lot harder than doing the same for 2012. But when it comes to random guessing about stuff I only half understand, I’m going to give it my best shot. Continue reading
Tagged with The Secret World …
Reviewing My 2012 MMO Predictions
At the end of 2011 I made a set of predictions about MMOs and the MMO industry. This is a pretty common thing to do, but I also feel I should own my predictions and actually check how accurate they were Continue reading
The Single Biggest Problem Facing MMOs Today
Someone else may have written this thought before, but it is new to me at the moment so I’m going to treat it as original. Continue reading
The Secret World: Buy-To-Play Isn’t The Answer
A few years ago, when everyone was charging box costs and subscription fees, buy-to-play (B2P) stood out as being different. In today’s market, TSW’s approach to B2P is possibly the worst of all worlds. Continue reading
The Secret World: Only 200k Copies Sold
Here’s a fun fact: it looks like Funcom’s last profitable quarter (by EBIDTA, anyway) was Q4 2010. The company has spent around a year and a half eating into its cash reserves. Continue reading
The Secret World: Half As Successful As Conan
According to a Google-translated-so-oddly-worded article, Funcom’s The Secret World (TSW) is a flop. It has sold only about half the number of boxes that Age of Conan (AoC) did – historically it appears that around 1 million AoC boxes were shipped at launch for sales of around 800k. So: 400k sold, and no idea how … Continue reading
What Can We Learn From Picking Winners?
Having spent a bit of time looking at some infamous AAA MMO failures, it’s worth trying to see what lessons can be learned from them. Continue reading
New Blogger Initiative (#MMONBI) – Fear The Power of Syp!
In the past month: Dominus closed EA BioWare laid off a lot of people from Star Wars: The Old Republic 38 Studios imploded Fallen Earth was cut back to bare bones staffing numbers The Secret World delayed its launch Some may see the above as just the culmination of a number of bad things happening … Continue reading
The Secret World: Fighting The Previous War
There has been one MMO that I’ve been interested in for a long time and that’s The Secret World (TSW). I joined the forum back in June 2007, but my account had issues with posting in threads, plus I’ve long since got over my interest in taking part in the “wouldn’t it be cool if…”-style … Continue reading
The Secret World: Great Facepalm Moments in Marketing Betas, Part 2
The first beta facepalm moment of The Secret World (TSW) beta sign up showed that Funcom wasn’t thinking about how they’d be perceived when they “broke” their own beta registration. This next moment shows that they aren’t really thinking about TSW in its beta promotions much at all. The second stage of registering for TSW’s … Continue reading
World Class Villains 