Age of Conan Layoffs

Troubled MMO developer Funcom of has recently laid off an unspecified number of staff from its North American offices. Under the banner of 'restructuring', the Age of Conan developer has taken a broad sword to the number of staff working on the bloody action adventure game based on Robert E Howard's fantasy novels.

It's more like knots in cotton than heaving well toned muscles for the fantasy slash-a-thon and it's not hard to see why Age of Conan didn't do as well as it could (or should) have. The writing was scrawled on the wall (in blood), when like Warhammer Online, the developers decided to cut content and classes at the eleventh hour. The game was released in a less than finished state (I couldn't even get the beta to run, which never bodes well) and the game was released with huge gaps in the content and some of the key instances broken.

While this has all been resolved with a recently released content patch that sorts out most of the game's ills, we all know how difficult it is for a game to recover fans once they've abandoned it (most gamers went from Conan to Warhammer, and then, unsatisfied, back to Warcraft). Courting those disenfranchised gamers back is a touch more arduous.

I've no idea what makes companies (that have spent millions on their games) give a green light for release on an unfinished product, but it's clear that releasing too early means a far lower player base than you could expect if you deliver a polished and working title.

Players have so much more choice than they did five years ago. If a MMO just isn't up to scratch they can pick and choose the game that does suit their needs. Pre WOW and EQ2 days a player would stick fast with a MMO in the (often vain) hope that the developers would resolve the issues that plagued so many games on release, but it seems these days that the retention rate is much lower.

Let's just hope the MMOs released in 2009 have a lot more polish.