Conan Exiles Producer's Letter - 2021 Year in Review
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With a new year (and a month) upon us, we get a producer's letter for Funcom's survival RPG Conan Exiles that goes over the big milestones of 2021 that include the launch of the Isle of Siptah expansion, an Xbox Game Pass release, community challenges, and the general growth of the game's playerbase. Check it out:
Greetings Exiles,
2021 has been an incredibly exciting and challenging year for us here on the Conan Exiles team. We started off the year preparing for the final release of our first expansion map, Isle of Siptah. The team was able to improve the Siptah map with your feedback during Early Access by adding NPC camps, Points of Interest, and activities. The team also added two amazing biomes in preparation for the final release on all platforms. We really enjoyed working on Siptah, despite the challenges that working from home during the pandemic presented.
We are proud of the final result of Isle of Siptah and your feedback and support made this journey feel all the more rewarding. The official launch on all platforms was met with an overwhelming amount of support from you all, as we achieved the highest concurrent player count since the game’s release. The launch campaigns we ran along with Siptah, such as the Twitch Drops and the Community Challenge, were also incredibly well received, paving the way for other possible future promotions.
In 2021 we also hit two important milestones as we released on two additional storefronts. First, on the Microsoft Store as part of the PC and Xbox Gamepass subscription. Getting to this point took a colossal amount of work from our teams, to who I want to wholeheartedly thank for their efforts, as well as to the Microsoft and Xbox teams who made this possible. We also drastically improved performance of the Xbox One client and received the Optimized for Series X|S badge resulting in Conan Exiles looking better than ever on consoles! Later in the year we released on the Epic Game Store and were able to bring Conan Exiles to another audience with full cross platform support for all PC stores. Once again, this was made possible thanks to the support of our friends at Epic Games.
With an eye on the future, we’ve also spent a good portion of the year planning and figuring out the best way to support our game for the long run. We are committed to Conan Exiles, it’s one of the greatest successes we have had at Funcom and we want it to become the best it can be. For that purpose, we have been growing our staff over the year and created a new Live team that is dedicated to the maintenance, support, and daily operations of the game. Thanks to this, we’ve been able to focus on addressing your feedback regarding critical bugs and Quality of Life additions that had not been possible in the past. We have also dedicated a team to provide support to our amazing modders, creating direct lines of communication with them so we can keep improving the devkit to better suit our community of creators. And this is just the beginning. We are committed to keep growing and adapting to support Conan Exiles on what will be one of its most exciting years.
I can’t wait to spill the beans on what is coming in the future, but for now let’s celebrate this past year with some facts and statistics about last year for Conan Exiles: We can confidently say that 2020 and 2021 were the most successful years for Exiles based on player counts and player activity. The development and launch of Isle of Siptah revitalized interest for veterans, and also gathered the attention of new players. And it didn’t stop there! The last quarter of 2021 also showed a surge in activity thanks in great part to the release of our in-game event “Grave Matters”. We’ve been keeping close attention to its reception and what you had to say about it. Thanks in great part to all your positive feedback, we’re planning for more events in the future so keep an eye out!
Another front we have seen positive growth with the game has been with streaming. Thanks to the new content added to the game and our campaigns, especially the Twitch Drops campaign, we’ve seen the viewership numbers hit an all-time high, even surpassing early access and the official launch period! We’re happy to say that we’ve improved our active player base and presence on streaming platforms and 2021 has been our strongest year to date. It’s been a year of experimentation on our end and we’re incredibly thankful to all of you for rewarding us back with your support which we are using to shape our plans to make 2022 even better!
As a final note, we have been celebrating the past year with a series of videos covering the new features and content added to the game, a showcase of a selection of our content creators -both veterans and newcomers alike- and a shoutout to some of the player-made mods that made an impact for our community in 2021. Make sure to give them a watch! And if you like numbers, we also published a series of infographics about statistics collected during Isle of Siptah’s launch week. You barbarians.
Thank you all for being part of our community and for having made 2021 one of the best years in Conan Exiles’ life. Here’s to 2022 and beyond!
