14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that The Secret World has failed to deliver the sales that developer Funcom has been expecting, the company still has long term plans for it and will continue to pursue its original vision of creating a “thinking man’s” MMO.
Ragnar Tornquist, who is the chief executive officer at Funcom, has stated, “We’ve had to let some people go, and we’re in the process of reshuffling and reorganising ourselves around the remaining staff. This is never fun, but it’s the way of things: we need to scale down from a full development team to a more cost-efficient live team.”
The executive also talked about the way the team saw the future of The Secret World and promised that they would create more content that would keep the current tone of the game.
He added, “We’ll continue to push the boundaries, and we’ll keep reinventing the wheel (quite literally). Five years ago, we set out to revolutionise the genre, and the revolution has just begun.”
Funcom has also launched the Age of Conan MMO, another game that was supposed to change the way players viewed the genre, but the game, after a bright start, failed to get a solid enough audience and has since been moved to the free-to-play model.
The game is still getting content updates and Funcom’s most recent MMO might also live on using the same model.
The Secret World was launched during July and has since then sold a little over 200,000 copies to players, which is lower than what Funcom expected.
It seems that strong competition from the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft is the biggest reason for the low sales.
The third issue for The Secret World will be launched during September and Funcom has announced more plans to deliver new raids and more player options during October.