Buried under all the WoW Classic news at the end of August was Funcom’s second quarter financial report. Let’s rectify our oversight with a peek now, shall we?
Funcom characterizes 2019 as a “transition between the turnaround and the growth phases of the company,” much of which isn’t “immediately visible” yet. While second quarter revenues ($8.9M) aren’t quite what they were back when Conan Exiles launched in 2018, they’re a big improvement over the low that was first quarter of this year ($5.8M). Over the quarter, Funcom dropped a brand-new game developed by Petroglyph: the co-op RTS Conan Unconquered (our impressions piece called it niche and punishing), which presumably helped that revenue.
Funcom appears to still be gearing up for production on (one of the planned trio of) Dune multiplayer titles; Joel Bylos, who recently stepped down from the top spot on the Conan Exiles team (and we are still speculating is working on Dune next) tweeted today that the Oslo-based Lead Designer position for the mutiplayer open-world DUNE game is still open.
It does look as if Funcom’s back-burnered the single-player Conan title it was working on. “The Open-world survival segment has very large reach and with our Dune open world game we are applying learnings from Conan Exiles to make an even better and broader reaching game,” the company says. “We still believe in the Conan single player game but right now Conan Exiles and Dune represent the biggest potential. As such, the single player game is temporarily put on hold.”
Work on the company’s upcoming US-based co-op shooter continues; likewise with Conan Chop Chop, which was recently delayed to 2020 so that it can be buffed with full online multiplayer. But don’t expect too much out of the company’s old MMOs; Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, and Secret World Legends aren’t mentioned except to tout “anniversary and community events” over the last quarter.
