With the news that Funcom are in some fairly deep financial trouble it’s a good time to have a look and see what went wrong for them.
As I covered recently the most important thing to recognise is that your players will leave you. There are too many things competing for your customers attention to rely on a hardcore of long-term subscribers for revenue. These players make up a tiny fraction of your earnings compared to the casual players who may only subscribe for 2-3 months (obviously if your game is awesome you’re more likely to convert casuals into Hardcores but that’s a different blog post).
So knowing that your players will leave you it’s important that you replace them. Constantly.
How do you replace these players? Advertising. Marketting. Special Offers. Anything. You need to keep your game constantly at the front of the media.
Lets look at some graphs from Google Trends:
The above is a chart showing World of Warcraft and Runescape. Two of the most successful MMO’s in the west right now. Note how both lines stay relatively level with fairly regular spikes.
This chart shows that both WoW and Runescape have managed to keep themselves at the forefront of the internets attention. Both games advertise heavily year round as well as having a strong element of word of mouth.
This chart shows Age of Conan and GTA4. Note the similarity in the curves. A small ramp up with a very distinct spike around their launch/release followed by a sharp decline. This is a completely traditional shape for a regular boxed videogame (try putting any recent console game into Google Trends and you’ll get a similar shape, I chose GTA4 because of their proximity on the graph).
GTA4 has actually managed to regain some mindshare with the PC release and the new DLC.
Age of Conan however has languished in complete obscurity since it was released.
On a hunch I decided to look up the following chart:
Warhammer Online has been following a similar pattern to Age of Conan. There was a huge amount of publicity around it’s launch (the pre-order numbers grabbed alot of headlines) but then that momentum completely dropped off once the game was running.
Now we discover that those 1.5million pre-orders have translated into maybe 300k paying subscribers and the game has been forced to merge servers due to a dropping average population.
Looking at these charts it’s very easy to draw the conclusion that using traditional videogames marketting techniques just doesn’t work well for a subscription based business model.
In order to maintain consistent subscriber numbers (nevermind growing them year on year like Runescape or Eve Online) you must market your product outside of your existing customer base every day from the moment you launch without taking a break.
