Funcom initiates 'temporary' layoffs

They're 'temporary' because Norwegian employment law allows companies to layoff staff for up to a year to enable companies to cope with unexpected downturns without permanently firing people. A company also avoids having to payout severance packages at a time of financial crisis.

However, if you were cynical & exploitative, I guess it would be possible to hire massively for a project, say a new computer game, and then after release when many of  those keen young developers aren't needed any more, exploit this legal loophole and dump your staff with virtually no notice, no severence packages and a promise that 'maybe' you'll get your job back in a year.

Failcom has invoked this law/loophole 3 times after their 3 major MMO releases - Anarchy Online, Conan and now TSW. (I'm not sure but I think they may have done the same thing after the Conan exp).

Honestly with the games like Heavy Rain and to a lesser extent Alan Wake out there I think they should make "Dreamfall 2 - The Longest Journey 3".  I think it would do very well.

if this best describes it then.. i hereby nickname "Funcom" to "Failcom"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Failcom&defid=3269130

serves them right.. its 2012 and many MMO's (especially free2play ones) are coming out, The Secret World is a "mediocre" subscription based SCI-FI MMO that had absolutely no chance at making any sorta money whatsoever and lets highlight som reasons why that happened:

1. failcom didnt allow any of the players to participate in closed beta (except for few preorders), but instead made a lame facebook app called "The Secret War" telling their players to try that out until the game is released.. people who preordered the game just to try it out had to wait for a specific date to enter closed beta testing, others that didnt like it recieved absolutely no refund whatsoever

2. failcom's CEO ditched the company and soon after, their market shares/revenue dropped enough to consider them bankrupt or nearly.. right now they have plans on contracting with LEGO to make yet another failed MMO to put them out of business completely

3. failcom threw the blame at several websites that gave them low ratings and bad reviews especially metacritic.. a movies/tv reviews website that barely has anything to do with gaming at all and probably doesnt give two craps about The Secret World nor failcom

4. failcom then takes out their own failure on the employees that developed the game.. saying they did a "lousy job" and their all fired to prevent losing further revenue? they've gotta be the stupidest video game company in the world (or 2nd to gpotato/galanet) lets look at a few things here:

- the auction house was never fixed, some talented players had to come up with their own way to create a 3rd party patch to fix it, and even with that fix only about 15% of the players had it, therefore they bought out the market and sold stuff while everyone else suffers and has to deal with QL10 greens

- instances was so lame, and entirelly bugged if u make one wrong move either your dead or the boss regenerates to full health, or your kicked from party.. yes very lame indeed

- the whole game was an open book! u can get the full walkthrough on google from various sites and go from QL1 to QL10 in 1 day.. everything was straightforward, repeative, and boring

- chat did not work properly, alot of people on youtube said it was fixed in 1.1.1? well no it wasnt. and now that failcom fired a large amount of their developers i doubt The Secret World would see any new updates or bugfixes anytime soon

- they rushed it out the door.. i mean as soon as i hit the character creation screen i almost logged out and uninstalled the damned game! i havent seen such poor work on a (2 year in the making MMO video game), where they brag about being the first ever game to make use of DX11 TXAA, their game did have adequately average graphics quality BUT very lousy animations, ugly avatars.. no matter how cute u make the girl look shes still gonna have a boxed shaped face, squared colored glasses and a large trenchcoat.. cmon! lousy physics, i could go on but im sure alot of people dont care or already have noticed these things

- they do not listen to player feedback at all, there was several key suggestions and helpful topics at the forums, which were greeted with "topic closed" or "deleted".. hell i left my two cents at the facebook fanpage only to find out that they revoked my commenting rights, what a lame company really.. failcom u let your players down, u let ur CEO down, u let your developers down, i dont think any future game would fix your current reputation i guess the best thing for you to do is make a smart move like SEGA did or go bankrupt.. its your choice

Here's a hint, Funcom: people don't want to invest money into playing your game when you're "temporarily" laying people off.

I wonder if the fact that the game has issues with 32 bit OS  has kept potential player away. I am just a casual gamer and  a32 bit OS work fine for most of my needs.   I was looking forward to trying TSW during the free weekend but the game does not work on 32 bit OS and Funcom has no plans to change the game.

How many potential users did Funcom eliminate by make this gaming decision.

Was expected really.. My faults are..

1) If your gonna make it sub base choose a low sub price, why does all company think there game is worth $15 a month, has anyone ever tried $5/month or even $10? 

2) The game gets old fast, and its appeal to a small mmo crowd..

3) Hybrid payment model would have been better, most mmo players nowadays push to end game within the free month period then judge that its not worth $15/month and say if the had a F2P option they would continue to play.

4) Biggest fault, Funcom has to appease investors so the high sub number there were expecting was moot at best .

They are blaming this on a poor metacritic score and poor word of mouth. Those aren't causes. They are symptoms of making a game people feel is really not that good, or average at best, and certainly one that is not worth buying and then paying every month to keep playing.

so its actually no Funcom.  -_-

....EA's cancer is spreading to its devs.....tisc tisc tisc

acutally this mmo was one of the view where almost no mmo players where interested, if you look at the past or upcoming mmo releases between 6 month and from the playerbase of mmo players i know like 5% or less were interested in that one. They need to compete with guildwars2 swotr and and and :( sry but i had wondered if this mmo would be a success

...Fun...com?

Secret World is the only MMO anyone has come up with in years that I was actually interested in playing. If they'd launched with game time cards, I'd have bought a copy and tried the game. (After having my Mastercard stolen from three different gaming company databases inside of a year, and the unbelievable ensuing hassles, either you give me an option for prepaid cards, or we just can't be friends.)

This is unfortunte for those who work in the company.

Hey everyone, I know they suck, and I do feel bad for Funcom since I was an avid Anarchy Online player years ago, but lay-offs are by very definition just temporary. Just seem to be a lot of confused comments on this post as to why they stated temporary. It's different than being fired, and while still bad, is better than be completely let go.

The more you know. :)

Its like Funcom gathered all the information they have learned from the failed launches of Conan and Anarchy Online and Conan's transition to free to play; and threw it out the window. The layoffs could of been seen way before the launch of Secret World by the press largely ignoring the game and the very little consumer interest. The lack of anything innovative, the stale old tab target combat, monthly fees, story doesn't sell a mmo; doomed this project which had ample time to respond and fixed from their previous games experience. They are out of money and SW will not help them recoop the money to hire these temporary layoffs back.

This is Funcom. I feel bad that anyone ever has to lose their job, but again, it's Funcom. No one was expecting Secret World to do well if they played the beta for half an hour.

As much as I understand the game must continue, it sucks, sometimes, to see the game, a mediocre one at that, to take precedent over the talent that made the game.

Instead of pulling the game and making a better one, layoffs occur. 

It's the bitter reality of the game industry.

I just want to see spontaneous enemy's who have some goal.  The 1 to 20 standing in a group just waiting to get picked off just kills me.

i didn't even play the game and could see this coming.

it tried to step out of the box to much and tripped over in the process. grate games have grate management to follow or create success, it seems they didnt have any of that.

Temporary?

Not really heard that before..

I canceled this month and they charged me twice, *after* cancellation.  This game was awful but the way they conduct their business is even worse.  Also the Auction House that couldn't get rid of already-completed sales?  

Horrible.  

Man , the SHEER amount of stupidity and plan disregard for the TRUTH in these comments is mind blowing.

First off, The Secret world isn't "Bland" nor is it "Generic." It's actually quite a bit different then many mmo's and IMO it's what SW:TOR should have been/was expected to be. They focus a lot more on solo focus with actual INTERESTING storylines and characters, instead of sipmly generic fetch quests (which there are, don't get me wrong) they actually have decent adventure-like detective style missions that require you the playe rto figure it out for yourself rather then having a waypoint and directions to complete everything.

The atmosphere of the game is great, especially in motion, the art team did a great job at bringing a horror element to life, from the haunted "black house" to the run down carnvial in the woods and other things. How anyone can say it has no life/it's generic is beyond me.

Second of all @Dumachum If you actually bothered to even know what the hell you're talking about, Funcom has actually been putting out new content for the game and plan to do so each month.

It just annoys me so much, I hav eplayed mmo's since EQ and for a long time I've grown tired of them, I wanted something new/different and TSW offfers it more then most mmo's do with it's story focused gameplay yet reviewers/uniformed people bash it without even giving it a single fucking chance. Then they wonder why all we usually get is WoW clones and Call of Duty rip offs, maybe it's because people don't try/support the games that do somethign different.

The Secret World hasn't sold well because people kept seeing these high end trailers with beautiful art and impressive effects but the finished product looks bland and lifeless, the game looks like a big rip to be honest......

So typical of Funcom they did the same with Age of Conan. Grab peoples launch money then fire everyone and all but stop working on the game completely. There is a reason why the term "funcom'd" exists, and all you people got it.