This week, Funcom dropped its financial report for the entirety of 2019. It’s not going to be a shock, since we covered all the quarterlies as they rolled along, but there are some insights from CEO Rui Casais worth noting.
For example, Casais notes that 2019 marked the “most releases in Funcom’s history, with a total of 10 game and DLC releases spread around four hardware platforms, 23 online stores and global retail distribution.” He points out the company’s focus on multi-platform releases and publishing, he talks up Conan Exiles as the studio’s “bedrock,” and even admits that Conan Unconquered didn’t generate “as much attention” as the studio hoped (yeah, everyone forgot about this game for a reason). And of course, he discusses the impact of Tencent, which is now the company’s largest shareholder, angling to become the only shareholder. On the horizon, there’s still DUNE, now prioritized in development:
“The biggest, most exciting and most ambitious of our projects is without a doubt the DUNE open world survival game we’re working on, after having secured the exclusive rights for PC and Console games with this fantastic IP. It’s a game that is still a few years away and will be a more ambitious and robust version of Conan Exiles set in the DUNE universe, designed to be a game as a service from the outset.”
There’s no mention of the Secret World film, in case you’re wondering, and the company’s performance in 2019 was roughly on par with 2017 (in 2018, there was a big jump in revenue as Conan Exiles launched).
