Funcom acknowledges poor performance, blames review aggregate site
Funcom has admitted The Secret World has performed poorly, pointing the finger at aggregate review site Metacritic.
Metacritic averages all review scores, and has been used by the industry for some time to gauge a game's critical reception.
The Secret World, an MMO dreamed up by The Longest Journey creator Ragnar Tornquist, recieved a combined score of 72 - much lower than had been expected by Funcom.
Funcom told investors today that this is the cause of lower than expected revenues, player retention, and the company's poor stock performance.
"While there are very positive reviews, there are as well mixed or average reviews from various press outlets, giving an aggregated score for The Secret World of 72 out of 100, which is to be considered low, and not in line with the positive feedback received during the beta phases from both press and players," said the investor update.
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"A game like The Secret World, which is not based on a well-known brand, is normally dependent on positive press reviews to achieve successful initial sales, in addition - but not limited - to other factors like word of mouth."
The Secret World has recieved very good customer ratings, and in this category Metacritic has awarded the site an 8.4 out of 10.
Even so, the aggregate score which draws the most attention, and Funcom suggests one possible outcome is that sales for the first 12 months after launch will be less than half what was anticipated in the "Conan-like" scenario initially forecast by the company.
Metacritic has drawn a great deal of criticism from the industry, and is controversially used by many publishers to assign developer bonuses and contract renewals.
There may, however, be other reasons the MMO did not perform to expectations.
Though the game includes purchasable virtual goods, it still uses a traditional subscription model, and also requires an initial purchase.
Subscription MMOs have, on the whole, been suffering from competition with free-to-play games, and BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic - released only this year - has recently recieved a free to play option.
Whatever the cause, it is no longer a secret that one of the most highly anticipated MMOs in recent years is something of a financial dissapiontment to Funcom, which has announced the game will now be distributed via Steam in an attempt to attract a wider audience.
If people would take the time to look into Metacritic and the biased publications, they would realize how useless and damaging the reviewers are who give low scores. The 40% review does not even contain useful criticism.
Some points are valid, however, if any of these reviewers spent a significant amount of time playing TSW, they would realize how quickly bugs are being identified and fixed. And it was never touted as a PVP game.
I think this is the first title that I've seen with so very little flaming/trolling on mmorpg.com. Everyone there hates everything and there isn't much negativity around TSW.
I can count on one hand how many games have given me repeated nightmares, in my 20+ years of gaming. No title in a decade has affected me as much as The Secret World does.
Lastly - Funcom's promise to deliver monthly content hasn't failed yet and as a subscriber, I'll be happily subscribing to this game for a very long time to come.
The Secret World shipped with so many problems, and still has so many problems, it's amazing they rate as high as they do. The response from customer service to the game's not registering my partner's video card was, "install takeownership.zip or GFY", a little more politely phrased-- not that it would have helped, as their card detection flat out fails, when nVidia finds it just fine with nothing more than a web app. TSW needs better support, better planning, and better execution if it wants to survive. Metacritic doesn't have nearly the impact on it that walking through a broken game world and encountering broken code does-- especially in situations where bugs are so individual that large portions of the game world don't believe they exist and will land on people experiencing them. In fact, some of the rabid, almost desperate defense of Funcom turns minor play problems into disheartening experiences when people ask for help.
The game's future isn't going to go well if the developers don't start being more forthcoming about known issues and start actually fixing them instead of treating it like a webisodic series and adding more and more broken code.
I will first say I am a fan of Ragnar Tornquist, Joel Bylos and the laid off Martin Bruusgaard.
The Secret World is brilliant, but also broken in places, mostly later in the game and those issues are being worked on.
Reading the most critical of the critics, their issues were, for the most part, just not fitting with the game. Games are very subjective and most of the really quite poor reviews have an unannounced but easily inferred bias.
That metacritic can be used to determine success and failure is just not right. I hope those who gave it, in my opinion, inappropriately low review scores realize that they have impacted many hard working creative people. I am not saying that all reviews should love the game as I do, but they need to be objective and provide actual reasons for the negative review. Frankly I had expected that the scores on metacritic would be roughly equal to the current player score.
As for customer service, I am sorry Underwhelmed experienced what they did and it is not indicative of my experience with the Funcom customer service. Usually its either adequate or, more often, stellar.
