"The firm acknowledged that reviews for The Secret World were mixed, noting that the poor critiques impacted sales of the game significantly."
If you want good reviews, make a good game. Funcom has a lengthy history of releasing games too early, buggy, and poorly optimized.
Funcom didn't try to gain back consumer trust *at all*, so everyone just shrugged this off as another Age of Conan before the reviews were ever written. It also didn't help that they hyped the game so much before ever releasing any details or gameplay videos, and then when the gameplay videos were finally released it was utterly uninspiring.
Not to mention how they were milking players right off the bat, charging them for the game. Then for characters. Then for add-on packs on day one. Then in a cash shop, on top of a subscription fee.
It's pretty obvious why this only sold 200,000 copies. Those are very poor sales, especially when you consider that Lollipop Chainsaw sold 700,000, had a cheaper development, and will have minimal operating costs post-release.
That's a one day issue to be expected with the launch of a large MMO. In contrast, the graphics options and keyboard/mouse controls in Dark Souls will likely never be addressed.
They know what gamers want. It's just not what the executives want gamers to want. So they're giving gamers what they (the executives) want instead, knowing that they control such a huge portion of the industry so gamers will either accept it or have to stop playing games.
"For millions of new gamers, the value is obvious: you get to try before you buy."
Apparently Peter Moore is oblivious to the concept of "demos" that has existed within gaming for decades.
If he wants to point to an example of a F2P game that can be innovative and of a high quality, perhaps he should point to one that has actually *been released*, rather than one merely in development by an internal EA studio that has hijacked the Bioware name (Bioware Victory) to try to give itself more credibility.
sircyrus' comments