City of Heroes Reaches Sunset, NCsoft Paying the Price

KingSkippus writes "At midnight Pacific on Saturday, December 1, NCsoft shut down the City of Heroes servers for the final time. Since announcing the closure, a group of players has been working hard to revive the game by getting attention from the gaming press, recognition from celebrities such as Sean Astin, Neil Gaiman, and Felicia Day, and assistance from fantasy author Mercedes Lackey. Meanwhile, NCsoft has been drawing negative publicity, including a scathing article about the shutdown from local news site The Korea Times, noting that the game was earning $2.76 million per quarter and that 'it is hard to comprehend what NCsoft means when they say they closed it for strategic reasons.' NCsoft's stock price has fallen over 43% since the announcement in August, almost 30% below its previous 52-week low, right when investors were counting on the success of the recently launched Guild Wars 2 to help boost the company."

Comments

Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[crazyjj]

Look, I think that more MMO's should allow for playing on alternate servers. And I appreciate that players put a lot of time and effort into building their characters.

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Dinghy]

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Yet amazingly, Everquest and even Ultima Online are still running, after 13 and 15 years respectively.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[gstoddart]

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Which is why a casual gamer like me looks at a game with an on-line component and says "I'll pass".

I'm too old and lame to feel like getting my ass handed to me by a 12 year old, so any form of online play for me is a negative instead of a positive.

I want to be able to pop a game in the console, and play. I don't want to care if they have decided to shut down the server, or if they have some terrible DRM which requires me to be connected to the internet. If your game can't work on a console which has no internet connection, I am not interested in your product.

This sounds like one of those situations in which someone published a decently successful game, and then decided to leave the players out in the cold as they move onto other things. I suspect an awful lot of people will look at subsequent NCsoft titles and wonder if it will be playable in a few years.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[ducomputergeek]

Exactly. I play a couple MMO's. In fact I let my XBL subscription lapse as I found that I could have more fun playing some of the Free-2-Play games and spending $20 a month on in game currency or a subscription to get stuff rather than spending $60 every few weeks for a new XBox game that usually I got tired of in a few days.

But I don't expect it to last forever. I view it as no different than going to a movie or to a bar both of which I'd spend $20 or more every time I go rather than $20 a month for probably around 20 - 60 hours of entertainment depending on the time of year and free time I have.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[crazyjj]

Yes, there are many MUD's that have been running even longer. But that's citing the *exception*, not the *norm*. Most MMO's, like most MUD's, have a certain shelf-life.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[falcon5768]

I wouldnt say most. Most bad ones yes, but good ones have that have active player bases usually survive for a long time. I played FFXI for years before giving it up and even with the release of FFXIV they smartly did NOT kill the FFXI servers which turned out to be a good thing considering how poorly the newer game was received.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Grimbleton]

Though some would argue UO died years ago and was replaced by an incompetent imposter.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[OrangeTide]

These MMOs are ultimately operating a service. Expecting them to operate it indefinitely is a bit naive.

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it? If it's a matter of getting it off the books and getting it off the executive radar, then spin it off into its own business as a wholly owned subsidiary. There are a lot of alternatives that don't amount to throwing a revenue stream in the garbage.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Dinghy]

Yes, there are many MUD's that have been running even longer. But that's citing the *exception*, not the *norm*. Most MMO's, like most MUD's, have a certain shelf-life.

True, and the *norm* for shelf life is typically when the expenses start to outweigh the income. It sounds like the plug was pulled on this far earlier, if they're taking in $900k/mo.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[pubwvj]

Which is why a casual gamer like me looks at a game with an on-line component and says "I'll pass".

Agreed. Especially if the game only allows company servers. A game with open servers is more interesting and more likely to be long lived.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[rahvin112]

Thanks to GE and their CEO's like Jack Welch US CEO's have been led to believe that if you aren't making 20% on it you should shut it down. This is the reason many successful and profitable business have been shut down or sold to the Chinese, because it was not making "enough" money. In most cases we'll never get those jobs back.

So blame GE and their former and current management for this view that MBA's now hold.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[michrech]

Asheron's Call is still up -- 14 years now, if I'm not mistaken...

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Jeng]

The company who started Everquest stated that they would not shut down the servers as long as there were active players. Who knows what will happen down the line though.

Also, they are still developing for this game, just a week or two ago the 18'th expansion was released.

I do not think there is any other MMO with anywhere close to the amount of content that Everquest has.

If you only played when the game first came out you would never recognize it as the same game.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

This was one of the beauties of CoH.

It was RIDICULOUSLY casual-friendly. And it was widely acknowledged that PVP in the game was a half-hearted attempt at best. Far FAR more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements, where you don't have to worry about competing with "A. Random Kid" on the internet. Just play how you want to. Team when you want to. Do whatever you want in the game. No competition unless YOU desire it.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Deathspawner]

Asheron's Call is still going strong also, and it's a subscription-based MMO. Populations are far less than there used to be, but things seem kosher for the moment.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Deathspawner]

It hit 13 years in November. Still a subscriber of two accounts. Populations suck but the game is still fun.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[bodangly]

This. UO is not still running.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it?

Well, the submission was quite obviously from a fanboy - and leave out much more than it includes.
 
Among the key facts that it leaves out is this - the number of players has been steadily declining for years. It may currently be bringing in more than spends, but that's not a situation that's going to last indefinitely. The curves some players published shortly after the announcement show possibly as little as a year at current rates - with some very optimistic assumptions about that curve and the costs of running the game.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nefarious Wheel]

I'm not entirely sure this is an MBA oriented issue -- NCSoft, though global, is a South Korean company. It would be difficult to accurately infer a cash growth-based motive for dropping it. It could be technical, or artistic reasons, or the big one -- the people capable of growing the game in terms of interesting play, simply weren't there. Perhaps they retired, left the company, or are being vectored off to GuildWars.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nefarious Wheel]

I stopped playing Everquest when I became aware it was a Sony product. Because of their corporate practices, their support of RIAA and their proclivity toward suing their customers, I would not play it if the game lined my pockets with real gold. Sony taking ownership of any game I play is a switchable offense.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[JakeBurn]

The CEO's are irrelevant. CEO's are ultimately beholden to the stock holders. People have begun to expect certain returns on their investments and when they don't get that the use their holding power to get rid of people who aren't doing whatever it takes. Its part of the reason why the stock market causes so many problems in our economy. You don't have to pass an IQ test to own stock and people's emotions can cripple a good company or make a shitty company with no real future ultra rich. This ROE is also why so many corporations don't care about people or the environment. As for the game, I don't understand any strategy that would involve shutting down a profitable anything unless they figured they could make even more money with the resources they will be freeing up.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

It was RIDICULOUSLY casual-friendly.

As a five year resident of the City - no, it really wasn't. There was considerable grind, and unless you wanted to play only a limited handful of the available archetypes that could solo well... you pretty much had to play on a team. And after the release of the Mission Architect and the game transforming into the City of Farmers... that could be difficult, even on Freedom. (By far the most populated server.) When the Incarnate system launched, along with the raid based WoW style endgame, life was pretty much over for the casual player.
 

Far FAR more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements

True, mostly. QOL improvement lagged greatly as the dev team was wedded to an iron schedule and consistently committed to new shiny over polishing the dulled and older bits.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

The funny part is how many different places people put that 'death'. Some put it at the introduction of Tram. Others at Publish 16 which reined in the tamers and bards. Others at Age of Shadows which transformed it into an item based game...

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It may not have been hugely profitable, but apparently it was not losing money.

Now couple that with the realization people had years invested in character development, and base development, smething most other games don't even have. This is hobbiest behavior and emotional investment.

Imagine some guy (Tony Stark, or Tim the Tool Man Taylor) spending years of evenings fixing up an old hot rod. Then some idiot comes along and garbage compacts it, saying that little business of selling old parts isn't in line with his WTF ever he has in mind, eve though it is easily carrying its own weight?

They are properly suffering rage. Sell the damned thing off or other properties (Champions, Lineage, even Guild Wars 2) will keep taking it on the chin, and at an even more accelerated pace.

Time to realize the full business model, gentlemen. Never again any NCSoft or associated company will get another damned dime from me until this happens.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Phrogman]

As bad as Sony was and is, Verant was even worse when I played EQ. Patches would arrive with zero warning and completely change a class or some other aspect of the game. No notes, no warning, and often no logic behind changes that was apparent. Sony was actually an improvement on things. Admittedly it was early in the world of MMOs so things were less polished but it was very frustrating.

As for shutting down COH when it was a viable game, its beyond me what their thinking must have been. The game was playable, had good crowds playing it all the time, and was turning a predictable profit every month. All they had to do was have the willpower to maintain or expand it. I played it from beta right through to its 5th year steadily, then periodically after that. It had the best group combat dynamic of any of the dozen or so MMOs I have played. Brilliant design in all regards IMHO.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If nothing else, my heart can't take having that much fixer-upper 60-month badge of that old hot rod bhobby work being ripped away again. NCSoft is not trustworthy.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Phrogman]

www.swgemu.com

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[cmdr_klarg]

It was RIDICULOUSLY casual-friendly.

As a five year resident of the City - no, it really wasn't. There was considerable grind, and unless you wanted to play only a limited handful of the available archetypes that could solo well... you pretty much had to play on a team. And after the release of the Mission Architect and the game transforming into the City of Farmers... that could be difficult, even on Freedom. (By far the most populated server.) When the Incarnate system launched, along with the raid based WoW style endgame, life was pretty much over for the casual player.

 

Far FAR more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements

True, mostly. QOL improvement lagged greatly as the dev team was wedded to an iron schedule and consistently committed to new shiny over polishing the dulled and older bits.

8 year resident here, up to the last day. Not sure how long ago that 5 years was, but COH of late had been very not-grindy in nature (YMMV, of course). Issue 24 (the one in beta when the axe fell) had a TON of QoL changes and additions coming, including solo Incarnate play. Ever since Matt Miller took over as Lead Designer the game had become VERY casual player friendly.

Oh, and Virtue had by far the highest population. :)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Anonymous Coward]

The people running the show at Paragon Studios hadn't changed for a significant time before the shutdown, and they all got immediately laid off with the closure.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Kierthos]

I'm not going to say you're wrong, because quite honestly, experiences vary... but the only Archetype I ever had trouble leveling were Controllers... and even then, it was more because I was goofing around.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[GerardAtJob]

forgot DAOC!!!

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[lennier]

This is hobbiest behavior

Well, that may be overstating it, but it's certainly hobbier than most.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[lennier]

These MMOs are ultimately operating a service. Expecting them to operate it indefinitely is a bit naive.

And that is exactly why "the cloud" is problematic. It's your data, everywhere, anytime, except when it's not and suddenly you're stuffed.

If there were some kind of standard for "entertainment cloud products" so that the ongoing creation of art assets was separated from hosting the service, that would at least a step forward. For goodness sakes, how many different proprietary subtly incompatible reinventions of "3D environment with physics and scripts" do we need before someone comes up with the 3D equivalent of the Web?

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Anonymous Coward]

City of Heroes was an embarassment to NCSoft.

Now, not the kind you're thinking. It was profitable. It wasn't as profitable as their core properties - but NCSoft basically has the WoW of Korea in Lineage. Comparing it to that is a bit harsh. The thing is, that's not what NCSoft is thinking.

They're thinking "We're the big shots. We can do this. In America. We just need the right subject matter."

See, never forget - Korea's VERY nationalist. Insanely so. Up there with China and Japan. You can't even depict a samurai in Korea (The origins of "Arthur the Katana-wielding Knight for Soul Calibur"). And so is NCSoft. They see themselves as representing Korea. So they came to export Korea to the US in the form of Lineage 2 and Aion.

Both of which did horribly. They failed, because we didn't want Korean Grindfest-style MMOs. We don't play 80% of our games in a net cafe (They do there). We are, a different market. And they needed to keep making up excuses as to why their Korean division wasn't dominating in America...and why City of Heroes was still alive when their 'theories' said it should be dead.

The answer, in the end, is that City of Heroes was a constant reminder of the failure of their corporate culture. They they were wrong. And in Asia, being wrong is worse then taking a minor loss - their idea is, essentially, that 'social harmony' (Read: Less drama in the office) is worth some unprofitable practices.

Like shutting down that embarassing American-grown MMO that's just a tiny bit of your bottom line, because you're also packing the WoW of Korea. Having it dead is the point right now. When they bought CoH, they saw it as a launchpad for their American business - now that they've failed to launch, it's time to remove any evidence of this foray to begin with.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[gl4ss]

still, if it was making money... wtf?

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

To be fair, CoX has been F2P for a while now, but I imagine there were still a reasonable number of subs, given it was still profitable at least.

I'm more worried about NCSoft's backslide & what that means for GW2. That's still the best mmo I've played since LOTRO came out & going from strength to strength, now into its 5th month. I'm just praying they don't take ArenaNet with them if they fuck it up royally & that ANet can get off the sinking ship & find another partner in time, or go it themselves (depending on bullshit contracts no doubt).

About time game publishers went the way of the dodo, along with most of Hollywood & all their MAFIAA middlemen cartel leeches & vultures, ahem.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

Blew my mods on previous post - +1 Insightful mate ;).

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[runeghost]

This is the elephant in the living room of western capitalism that is seldom discussed. A corporation makes a reasonable profit doing what it was founded to do, employees are happy with their work and their pay, and customers are satisfied with the nature, quality and price of what they are buying. There are no signs of impending collapse, for internal or external reasons. And yet, it all gets torn down in search of higher rate of return, or a more profitable quarter, or bigger bonuses for a handful of executives.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

I may have one of 3 people who loved the item AH and the new Rogue Isles alignment system, but oh well, we'll always have the memories.

Being there at launch & through so many amazing events & great gaming moments, weekly team games with peeps from around the world...goodbye Kelvin Ator, goodbye Ruby Rock, Minion Mistress and Aero Man...*sniff*

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

Though I agree with the sentiment, so long as there is cost & money/profit involved, someone will want to own & control it. The only alternative is an iron-clad contract that the server code & database will be floated to the public domain if & when a mmo goes belly up, which with IP being what it is will ever happen. The only alteranative is playing an open source mmo ala Ryzom & others, but those a slim pickins my fine furry-feathered friend!

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[hurfy]

hmm, good point.
Never played it, but it sounded like it deserved a good send-off.

Motor city online released some outlandish car mods after their announcement. I think the devs worked til the second they pulled the switch. Not saying much if you can't match EA of all people.....

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

That's a MUD. Meridian59 is probably the oldest 'real' mmo still running on free servers out there - going on 17 years on Dec 15 :).

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[trytoguess]

An... interesting post, but I really must ask, where are you getting this information? Articles? Insider information? To be frank, the notion that a business would cut something profitable simply because they didn't accurately analyze their foreign market is somewhat difficult to accept automatically.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

Look, for those who just have to have their spandex fix, Champions Online & DCUO are still going strong & are F2P (mostly). I much prefer DCUO over CO, but to each their own. Only thing I dislike about DCUO is the useless pets, as I'm a pet class aficionado, but then again, GW2 necro pets are a PITA as well, but I can't stop playing with them, so go figure.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

Vanguard also had some potential that was never fully realised, sadly.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

They had over 8 years, which is not a bad run for mmos, probably top 10 for A-grade commercial ones, eh.

And you call yourself an OB (Old Bastard) gamer, with that console cretinitis you admit to!? For shame!!! ;-p

Getting a game to work on a PC is half the fun man! And seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY, try out Guild Wars 2 - it might just restore your faith in online communities. Just stick to the PvE carebear part of the game, where there is no PvP/ganking or node ninjaing, and co-op is not only encouraged, but rewarded!
It has actually, (shock-horror!), made me want to try out WvWvW (massive 3-server realm battles) which is one of the PvP options available.

It's probably the most sensational solo-able mmorpg in, well, forever, as the guys at ArenaNet have re-written some fundamental design idioms/paradigms with mmos, mainly by getting rid of everything WoW-like, or grindy, or too competitive/non-productive from the ground up. Even the fast travel system makes getting around in a flash trivial. Ok, end of shameless plug - I have no affiliation with ANet or any of their wives. Ahem.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[srmalloy]

I'm sorry, but if you had trouble soloing with any archetype, you were doing something fundamentally wrong.

If their experience was solely from before the addition of the archetype inherents -- Containment, Defiance, et al., then they were correct; I remember with my Fire/Rad Controller back in 2004 that solo advancement choked off in the early teens, because you didn't get the damage output you needed to defeat mobs quickly. Yes, sure, you drop Fire Cages on them to lock them in place, slap down Radiation Infection on one, and then you can stand there Brawling them to death one by one as they keep missing you, but until Veteran Rewards were instituted you didn't have a good attack until much later in the game. Of course, once you hit 32 and got your pet(s), all bets were off. Illusion Controllers had it easier; they got Phantom Army at 16, and even earlier than that could use Deceive to completely mitigate incoming damage while they ground opponents down, but the original game design had some definite gaps in solo ability between the various archetypes.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[palndrumm]

If they had cut the developers to 20 and kept the game going until it slowly died it would be no big deal and we would understand.

And that would've been perfectly feasible to do, too - before NCSoft bought out Cryptic they were able to keep the game running as well as publish occasional new content and updates with as few as 15 staff. If it was just put into a low-maintenance, no-further-updates mode and left to run out its days until it became unprofitable, they could probably have managed it with half that number of people.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[hairyfeet]

This is just another perfect example of "company doesn't listen to customers, company gets boned" which we have seen play out again and again and again. if it wasn't making a profit, or costing more in dev time that it was raking in? Then sure I could see pulling the plug, but its obvious that they yanked it to try to "force" more customers onto their "new hotness" and it blew up in their face.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

It was RIDICULOUSLY casual-friendly.

As a five year resident of the City - no, it really wasn't. There was considerable grind, and unless you wanted to play only a limited handful of the available archetypes that could solo well... you pretty much had to play on a team.

Casual != Solo

Also, some changes were coming up that were tweaking some of the ATs that were having difficulty soloing in certain ranges in the game. Unfortunately that Damocles guy started swinging.

Anyhoo, the only ATs I didn't play a heck of a lot were Dominators. But I've solo'ed tanks, brutes, defenders, Controllers, Arachnos Soldiers/Widows, Kheldians, Blasters, etc.

Did I NEVER team? No. But I had relatively few problems soloing when I wanted to solo.

And after the release of the Mission Architect and the game transforming into the City of Farmers... that could be difficult, even on Freedom. (By far the most populated server.) When the Incarnate system launched, along with the raid based WoW style endgame, life was pretty much over for the casual player.

As was pointed out, endlessly, in the forums, if you expect to stand around in Broadcast and go "Gimme Team!", yeah. Teaming is going to be tough.
But nothing about finding a couple of your chosen server's active channels negates the game remaining "casual".

Additionally, the end-game raiding system was optional. Just the way PVP is optional.

True, mostly. QOL improvement lagged greatly as the dev team was wedded to an iron schedule and consistently committed to new shiny over polishing the dulled and older bits.

Well, new shiny pays bills. Tweaks to existing stuff, while important, happen as a convenience unless something breaks. Still, the issues where they went to town on QOL, they REALLY went to town! And i24 was looking to be another Big QOL issue.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it, they haven't shut down Guild Wars 1 and the last time that game had an expansion was in 2007.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

Look, for those who just have to have their spandex fix, Champions Online & DCUO are still going strong & are F2P (mostly).

Now, neither CO or DCUO are BAD (though DCUO has some major problems as a PC-based MMO).

But this argument is essentially "We've closed down your favorite pizza place. But you have options for pizza! This other place run by a guy who USED to work for your favorite place and has a knock-off product that's so-so (CO). Or this other place that'll serve you a mean sandwich! (DCUO)"

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[germansausage]

Why is hobbyist such a hard word for people to spell? Perhaps it has to do with the elimination of the letter "Y" from our language. Hamburger patty is now hamburger pattie on 98% of all menus I see. A sign of the apocalypse, no doubt.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

No thanks.

1: It's NCSoft. NEVER investing time, interest, or MONEY into one of their products again. Yes, yes. I know that ArenaNet is who made it. But NCSoft owns ArenaNet, lock stock and barrel.

2: It's STILL a traditional fantasy gear n' grind. Albeit, with some of the rough edges of other gear n' grinds sanded down.

I have exactly ZERO interest in Fantasy MMOs.
I have even less interest in MMOs where my gear determines what I can do and what I look like.
I have exactly NO interest in endless grinding.

When accommodating my tastes, CoH got a LOT of stuff right, right out the gate. And, through further refinement over 8 years, they dialed it in more and more.
Yeah, the game spoiled the fsck outta me. So everything's gonna play second fiddle. Especially in rosy hindsight.

But, when I want a McLaren F1, the answer isn't "Go buy a Subaru. Or a Kia."

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[trytoguess]

Since you know where the information is, it'd help if you just shared a link instead of making me repeat your efforts. I'll read any links anyone posts here, but I'm not going go out of my way to look for evidence of something that I consider outlandish and unlikely.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Creepy]

Korea has a reasonable grudge against Japan - Japan annexed them in 1910 (and occupied them for about 40 years before that and 35 years after) and basically ruled with an iron fist. If you lived under a police state for 75 years and then was set free, I imagine you'd either create a new police state or create the total opposite. Interestingly enough, Korea did both. As for how nationalistic, well, in the north if you were threatened with three generations of punishment for crimes against the state, you probably wouldn't show any dissent. In the South it is more the constant threat from the north and their freedom after WW2 and continued freedom from the Korean war driving patriotism.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

Would you rather starve to death than eat french fries...? ;-p

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

CoH was a fantasy mmo, let's be clear about that ;-p

ArenaNet are worth supporting, NCSoft aside. They are also physically based in the US, so it will be a bit harder for NC to wreck them if they operate on their own currency & balance sheet, even if they wanted to. They could well walk away tomorrow & go work for another publisher, or self-publish, who knows, so long as they don't end up with EA or Activision *cringe* (that's funny - Chrome spell-checker suggests this replacement for the later: Vivisectionist :))). So long as the 3 amigo founders are still at the helm, I'm not too worried. And it's only $60 with no monthlies - not really a huge loss even if you only got 3 months our of it say. Remember, those guys broke away from Blizztard for all the right reasons & wouldn't have sold off ANet to NC unless they had some pretty good safety valves - and keep in mind, they're still working there...unlike the founders of Bioware & what EA did to them in recent times (though I would still recommend SWTOR now that it's F2P, if you haven't tried it already, as that's even more single-player friendly than GW2 in many ways).

And 'grind'...you want GRIND ffs??? CoH was far more of a grinder than GW2 will ever be. Clearly, you read between my lines, where there was nothing, to come to your own previous conclusions & pre-conceptions, rather than focus on the actual things I said & the similarities I suspect with our play styles. Your loss mate, but if you do sign up Chas, PM me & I'll even play with you, but only if you promise to be a carebear grumpy old bastard like myself & never break character! ;).

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

8 year resident here, up to the last day. Not sure how long ago that 5 years was, but COH of late had been very not-grindy in nature (YMMV, of course)

From five years ago until closing day, and while the lower level grind pretty was much cleared up after Posi and War Witch took the reins - the 30/35+ grind remained. (Remember the old saw "welcome to level 40, you're halfway there"?) And yet more grind (for Incarnate experience) came in after Issue 22.

So no, it didn't become much more casual player friendly. In fact, for the endgame, it steadily became *worse*. (And because of the WoW style play, if you didn't have the right gear/Incarnate slots - you were pretty much locked out of it.)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

That puts you in a minority. Defenders were notoriously hard to solo, and Blasters could be almost impossible once you got to (roughly) 25/30+ and starting seeing more mobs with mez.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[DerekLyons]

Casual != Solo

No shit Sherlock. That's why I addressed the problems with finding teams after Issue 14 and the Mission Architect.
 

As was pointed out, endlessly, in the forums, if you expect to stand around in Broadcast and go "Gimme Team!", yeah. Teaming is going to be tough.
But nothing about finding a couple of your chosen server's active channels negates the game remaining "casual".

Yeah. Following the 'active' (read often spam filled) channels on your server equated to easily finding a team... not.
 

Additionally, the end-game raiding system was optional. Just the way PVP is optional.

By that logic, everything after Outbreal/Breakout/Galaxy City was "optional".

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[LurkerXXX]

Cisco killed the Flip camera when Flip was making money. Killed it instead of selling it off. Businesses do crazy things for strange reasons all the time.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[geminidomino]

more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements

Out of curiosity, what does "QOL" mean, in MMO/Gaming terms? Working in the medical industry, I keep thinking "Quality of Life" but I'm not sure what that would mean even if it is the right expansion. :)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[dadioflex]

Like most F2P games they had an item shop for buying character slots, buffs, customization choices, story arcs etc. I think that's where most of the income for these games comes from these days with even the subscribers having an incentive to speed over and above their subscription.

I suspect that City of Heroes was seeing diminishing returns from their story expansions. The user base had come to expect big new events a couple of times a year but they were likely making less of a return on each one.

(And I hear ya about GW2 and LOTRO both. LOTRO is still one of the best MMORPGs out there and a reasonable experience without paying a penny.)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[dadioflex]

Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot - all still up and running. A lot more recent but rapidly failed as subscription MMOs, Warhammer Online, Dungeons and Dragons and Age of Conan are still going. Asherons Call 2 was the first big name failure I remember that was shuttered - somewhat interesting game that fell apart because they forgot that an RPG works better with NPCs, cities and such and not just a landscape.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[dadioflex]

I would not play it if the game lined my pockets with real gold.

I would. Where's the gold pocket-lining Beta sign-up?

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Cimexus]

Hell, to make the comparison even more relevant, two of NCSoft's MMOs older than CoH are still running: Lineage (in Korea only), and Lineage II (which still has both Korean AND Western servers up and running).

Lineage II is 'only' about 9 years old but Lineage 1 is ancient - similar era to the two you mention.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Cimexus]

Hey I'm a westerner and I liked L2 (and to a lesser extent, Aion). Played L2 for a good 6+ years. Aion just for a year or two (didn't like the lack of interesting economy and bind-on-equip items).

The thing that attracted me to Lineage II is that unlike many Western MMOs (cough, WoW), it doesn't hold your hand. The economy is player driven (most items are player-crafted instead of dropped, somewhat like EvE Online). PvP is open - anyone can attack anyone provided you aren't in town (...but there are consequences). Because it's about inter-clan politics and territorial control. And most of all because it requires you to work together to acheive things - you can't do much at all by yourself. You need to forge alliances to succeed. Grouping is far more effective than soloing. A big part of this is that the character classes were so specialised (at least, at first, up until they started giving healer/buffer/support classes decent attacking skills).

Now I am probably not the typical western gamer. I'd probably fit in well in Asia. But yeah, I wouldn't say L2 was a miserable failure ... they had 8 or 9 servers running for quite a long period of time. It wasn't a raging success but it had a good western community. The problem is, everyone makes the comparison with the ridiculously-successful WoW ... and everything looks like a failure compared to that. But WoW is the exception, not the norm.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[S77IM]

The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Cimexus]

I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.

It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.

This could even extend to players or clans being able to physically purchase land and set permissions on who could build on or alter that area. Perhaps a particular clan would buy narrow strips of land running between settlements, and build roads or train tracks on that land (which the game mechanics would allow you to do, and which would permit much faster travel than walking). Others might become traders (since there's no NPC shops). Others might even offer secure storage facilities to players that had too much stuff to store in their personal inventory (i.e. they'd build some big, tough structure out of very-hard-to-destroy materials, allow people to put boxes inside with their stuff ... the game would have to support some 'locked box' permissions system to ensure that the building owner couldn't just steal everyone's stuff etc.)

Would be quite interesting to see which people tried founding cities and trade hubs, and failed, and which succeeded. And why did they succeed? Could they offer people in that area better security than in other areas? Was the area closer to transport or resources?

Anyway yeah, just a thought. I would totally play that kind of game...sounds awesome. I love sandboxey stuff (and don't like most conventional MMOs that are story/quest driven and prohibit you from doing certain things).

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

By that logic, everything after Outbreal/Breakout/Galaxy City was "optional".

Technically? Yeah.

Realistically, you could experience the entire game from 1-50 without the need for participating in Incarnate content. And, while slower than I liked, solo Incarnate content was being released.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

Depends on who made the fries.

http://youtu.be/e8pLQvzHFow?t=3m13s

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Chas]

CoH was a fantasy mmo, let's be clear about that ;-p

This is why I didn't say "fantasy MMO".

I said "traditional fantasy MMO".

Y'know. Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, etc. Healers, Knights, Clerics, etc, etc, etc.

ArenaNet are worth supporting, NCSoft aside.

Undoubtedly. If only it were that simple. If there was some way to give them my money in a fashion where a company I've chosen to boycott wouldn't benfit, I'd at least look into it.

They are also physically based in the US, so it will be a bit harder for NC to wreck them if they operate on their own currency & balance sheet, even if they wanted to.

Tell that to Paragon Studios. They were in exactly the same financial and logistical position ArenaNet is. That didn't save them.

And 'grind'...you want GRIND ffs??? CoH was far more of a grinder than GW2 will ever be.

Uh. Yeah. No. Try again.

Granted, there are a lot of "hunt X of Y enemy", but a lot of that stuff was from VERY early on in the game. Badges that previously required umpty-bajillion of something (the "NO POSSIBLE WAY to get there WITHOUT farming", like the healing badges) had their numbers reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

In the last few years, Paragon's been all about giving players multiple avenues to acquisition of stuff they want. So if you don't want to have to run stuff 30 gazillion times to build up a given currency? You don't have to.

And thanks for the invitation. But my stance is fairly clear. I have less than zero interest in GW2. I don't care how cheap it is.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[aevan]

As how I'd use it, would mean just that.

Rather than spend twenty minutes going from ship to hanger to customs to outside...a game would let you just opt to 'appear outside'.
Instead of spamming some global chat for an hour, a 'looking for party' search system is setup.
Instead of that cruddy LFP, a 'matching up people' system is setup.
Instead of dismounting to talk to an NPC to turnin a quest, then immediately remount, you can now talk to the NPC while still on your horse.

The little tweaks and changes that don't affect combat or make your character more powerful... but instead get rid of the nuisances and issues you the player have, making the game more enjoyable. (YMMV-some QoL changes have people screaming about broken immersion or 'missing the point' e.g. instant-travel ability vs sense of world's size)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[whizzter]

You mean http://www.wurmonline.com/ ? (A MMO that by no accident notch was working on before Minecraft)

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Crosshair84]

The other elephant in the room is that this strategy very often bites you in the ass very badly. The vast majority of corporations, like the one I work for, doesn't do such stupid things because the boss/owner is in the business for the long term.

One of our competitors dropped a lot of smaller facilities in one state they serviced because they weren't making the return they wanted. We snatched up as many of those contracts as we could. How did that bite our competitor you may ask? Because now we had a sizable market share in that state. Sure it was with the small facilities, but looking at a map it looked impressive. Soon word spread to the larger facilities about our services. When the contracts came up for renewal at the larger facilities, we had credibility, a good reputation to back us up, and a map showing the sizable coverage area we had. Our competition started to lose some of the larger, much more profitable facilities because they didn't maintain their less profitable ones.

In the past, people made money off company stock through dividends. Under a gold standard, inflationary credit expansion was difficult and limited, any artificial credit expansion was cut short by people demanding payment in gold and the resulting recessions, required to clean up the errors made during the artificial boom, were relatively mild. The only way to make money was by long term investment in plant and equipment, to increase production and lower costs, and then pay out the company profits in dividends to shareholders.

Today, under a government monopoly of fiat currency, the best way to "make" money is to get cheap credit from the central bank, or the large banks who have special favor with the central bank, and slosh it back and forth in the market. Whoever gets the new fiat money first benefits because they get to buy before that inflation has trickled into the economy and caused all prices to rise. That "sloshing" is why we see some prices rise more than others and at different times.

Of course, sloshing around printed fiat currency doesn't make society more wealthy, It makes a select few richer by stealing the existing wealth from the poor and middle class via inflation.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[kannibal_klown]

Yup.

It's also an MMO that I stopped playing some years back. I have GREAT memories of the game; it was my first MMO and probably my favorite. But still... it's old. Mittens for hands, low poly count, etc. A better story and such than the "other 2" super hero MMOs though.

What I do find odd, is that apparently it was still making a profit! 2.7mill a quarter might not be huge, but that's at least something. So I do find it odd to cancel something bringing in that much. When they said they were shutting it down, I assumed it was because it was losing money... I guess I was wrong.

The best suggestion I've read is they want people off that game so they'll hopefully flock to their newer (and probably more expensive) new game (Guild Wars 2) which seems risky to me.

People, like myself, dug City of Heroes because it WASN'T a sword-and-fantasy MMO.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[crazyjj]

If Second Life is any indication, you would end up with a lot of flying penises, empty houses, and dance clubs.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[geminidomino]

Oh, cool. I always called those sort of things "horrible gameplay flaws." I didn't know they actually had a metric all their own. :)

Thanks! Learned something new today.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Dextrously]

CoH Community: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,4877.0.html
NCSoft Response: http://us.ncsoft.com/en/news/response-to-city-of-heroes-player-and-fan-suggestions.html
CoH Community: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5467.0.html

The rest is speculation. Considering the history of NCSoft business practices, this seems par for the course though.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[trytoguess]

True, companies do thing that we'd consider strange all the time (whether what they did is actually strange is another story). But my issue with the Anon's post is he seems to be assuming that because Asians care about keeping up appearances more than other cultures it must be the reason they cut City of Heroes, and I find that logic dubious. NCsoft is a business, and they tend to prioritize making money over all else regardless of nationality after all.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Mal-2]

I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.

It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.

I like Minecraft largely because it ISN'T an MMO. I've had players request server plug-ins (namely Factions) and have repeatedly said no... and yet they continued to nag until I made a public announcement that NO YOU CAN'T HAVE FACTIONS, IF YOU WANT AN MMO, GO PLAY ONE... SOMEWHERE ELSE. They got WorldGuard, and although that is inconvenient (admins have to do all the setup), it DOES work. On the most recent iteration of the true survival world, I gave everyone a 19x19 plot protected bedrock to sky, and a house. There is also a protected Trading Center. That's it, everything else is a free-for-all and no protection requests will even be considered. Even myself and fellow admins get only the same 19x19 plot as everyone else.

As to the Second Life reference below... my Minecraft server has a dance club (with flashing lights, a potion bar, and a working, user-operable DJ booth) and multiple cinemas with redstone-powered screens and music. They're not in the survival world (Multiverse is a very nice thing to run) but the cinemas are not so resource-intensive that I couldn't build them in a pure Survival world. The disco is admittedly more of a Creative-mode-only thing, as it involves a huge excavation, LOTS of redstone and note blocks, and would have been extremely difficult to build without the ability to fly.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[trytoguess]

Hi different Anon,

Face in this case could be defined as a positive social value a person has. Some Asian cultures put more value to this compared to other parts of the works and are not as likely to air their dirty laundry as a result. And if people see their dirty laundry, people are more likely to take some act to show remorse.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[trytoguess]

Thank you for the links, they were an interesting look at the fanbase. I'm not sure what you mean by par for course though. You mean they cut games that are profitable? They don't sell games that they no longer want?

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Dextrously]

Unfortunately, that is exactly what I mean. They have shutdown some other games in a similar fashion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCsoft#End_of_Life_.2F_Closed .

I don't know the stories behind them, but I heard on the forums at Titan that they refused to sell the rights to some of the failures on that list as well.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Vlado]

Or maybe it was just a whooosh for you.

Sean Austin being known for his hobbit role?

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[wwphx]

It may not have been hugely profitable, but apparently it was not losing money.

We had the same thing happen where I live with grocery stores. Small town (40k) with an air force base. Before Walmart opened a small store 15ish years ago, there were five grocery stores in town. Walmart came in, everyone profitably co-existed, then they opened a super store, and now there's just one other grocer in town. Albertson's was here, and though they were profitable, they closed the store. Now Albertsons is coming back, and the executive crew that inspected the town said "I don't know why we left in the first place." I am SO looking forward to stopping spending money at Walmart, I never gave them a dime before I moved here and in a couple of years that will be true again.

I think a lot of the problem is bean counters, i.e. MBA's. If you've maximized returns, and cannot further increase them without disproportional cost, shut it down and move on to something else. It doesn't matter if you're servicing a small community that wants you there and are still profitable, shut it down because you're not making as much as other stores.

Vulture Capital at its finest. When Mervyns died, they died because they were sold to Scorpio Capital and Scorpio turned around and charged them market-price rent on the land that they used to own. There was no way the chain could compete and they folded. And in most cases, the land that those stores are on is still vacant.

And some people want less regulation on capitalism? Screw that. They will never get my vote.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[wwphx]

I have heard that Koreans drive on the right side of the road because Japan drives on the left, another rebellious act carrying over from the occupation and war.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[srmalloy]

From a comment in an interview for OnRPG with Matt "Positron" Miller and Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, lead developers on City of Heroes, going F2P increased their revenue, allowing them to put more work into development than they had originally planned, increasing the amount of content that they released to the players through the in-game store (article here):

Matt: Oh my goodness was F2P the right move for us! We were making a LOT more money per month than the normal subscriptions brought in. This allowed us to leverage even more for the Paragon Market. If we were not doing well we wouldn’t have been adding as many costumes and power sets to the market over the past year and planned out as many as we had.

Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO

[Nostromo21]

No surprises. As others have well dissected & analysed the sitrep with NCSoft, it's all about them saving face from their Korean mmo flops in the US & wrecking a long-term popular western mmo in the process...because they can. There simply isn't another reason I can think of a company ditches a core product line that's still making money, however little. Is NC a public company in Korea & is their balance sheet/P&L available to the public - does anyone know? Would be interested to do a bit of creative accounting with the CoX line & see what comes up. :)

Reading between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

"shut down the City of Heroes"... "for strategic reasons"... "to help boost"... "the success of the recently launched Guild Wars 2".
Seems pretty clear to me.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Sarten-X]

Well put, sir (or madam).

...and me without my mod points...

Re:Reading between the lines

[asmkm22]

I'm not sure how shutting down CoH would have helped GW2 post launch. Especially since CoH was more or less run independently by Paragon Studios, who have no real connection to ArenaNet. The target audiences are even completely different. Lastly, since GW2 lacks a subscription, it would be difficult for one to take away from the other financially.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

CoH players want to go somewhere. Most of us have already been there, done that for WoW, Champions Online, and othere. I even had two concirrent P2P accounts on Eve Online and came back yet again to City of Heroes.

So the latest and newest is what we'd look to, and that's either GW2 or SW Republic, the latter of which many like me have already abandoned before the summer was over.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Ambassador Kosh]

Some of them I have seen showing up on DCUO since that games has been improving nicely.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Brian Kendig]

"No consequence to dying" - untrue. It's true that you can be resurrected, but dying damages your armor and makes it harder to continue to stay alive until you head back to a town to have it repaired. And if everyone in your party is dead and there's no one left to resurrect you, then you have to go back to the last waypoint. I've seen huge zergs go after bosses and fail by being entirely wiped out.

"Players versus door" - you're missing the fact that the other team is trying to reinforce their door and kill you while you try to break down their door and kill them. Strategy, boy, strategy.

"Complete ghost towns" - I've reached a level 75 PvE area in the game (Malchor's Leap) and there are plenty of people around to join, help, and be helped by. I've seen no evidence that people are abandoning Guild Wars 2; to the contrary, the events they've had so far (Halloween, Lost Shores) have been well conducted and extremely well attended, and a lot of people are looking forward to Wintersday.

It's a beautiful game, I've been enjoying the exploration and the crafting, the Trading Post (auction house) is done right, there's enough challenge to the dungeons to keep me coming back, the world is dynamic with a lot of things to do, and there are lots of other players to help make the going easier.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Roman Coder]

What I read so far seems to indicate that it was making money, not costing money. If that's right, then I'd like to know the REAL reason for closing it down.

This is why all games should self host

[haplo21112]

Its fine for the maker to host the main servers and all, but really the door should be open for users to do thier own hosting.

Re:This is why all games should self host

[Genda]

There you go, a distributed processing game where you run a client but also host a piece of the global server. That way the game processing scales with the user base and there's nobody to say "See ya" except perhaps the game master controlling the distributed services. Wonder how you would minimize the latency problems? Oh well, I'm no gamer, this is for those among you more heroic than I.

Re:This is why all games should self host

[whereiseljefe]

This would be a nightmare. Distributed processing is "easy" when you can break the workload into self-contained stateless chunks of information. By its nature an MMO is extremely state-ful which makes a peer to peer structure difficult. Then you introduce trust issues (how does my node trust the inputs your node is giving me, how does your node trust the health state information mine sent you, how does OPs ever know what we know). I'm not going to sit here and say it's impossible, that's a sure-fire way to find a foot in my mouth, but there are some major hurdles that are nigh-on insurmountable and dicate that you need a central server of some sort. Though honestly there is a possibility they could scale back the service and allow people to rent servers but then they need to hire a maintenance crew that could be better serving NCSoft's bottom line by assisting in GW2 upkeep. I doubt they'll ever actually release server code or even server binaries as there's probably a ton of proprietary code that is heavily reused in currently active mmos.

Re:This is why all games should self host

[Genda]

Or you could isolate trust dependent server components and put them on some cloud server for scalability sake, still offloading a significant amount of server's computational heavy lifting to the distributed network. Yes there is redundancy on the nodes, but you would keep the primary server lean, and that would minimize the cost of the environment per users.

There are so many ways to skin this cat, you just need bright babies and a desire. Make it open source so you get a lot of play, and once you have the gaming engine and clients, people can begin making all kinds of fun... a veritable play-verse.

They could have at least handed it off to somebody

[Sydin]

It's been fairly obvious since the initial announcement that a lot of people are interested in seeing City of Heroes continue, and going to extreme lengths to make it so. If NCsoft really does not, for whatever reason, want to continue to host it, than why not just pass it off to somebody else? I'm sure they could have sold off the servers to somebody and at least gotten some salvage value. Hell, they could have brokered a deal were whoever they sell it to still charges a fee to play, which NCsoft gets a percentage of. It's just boggling to me that there is very obvious money to be made, yet a company seems to have no interest in making it.

There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[sandytaru]

You can't shut down your cash cow just because you're banking on your shiny new toy. What if the new toy flops? If SE had shut down FFXI prior to the diasastrous launch of FFXIV 1.0, the company would have gone bankrupt. All that time, the revenue from XI kept them afloat.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Rakishi]

You can't shut down your cash cow just because you're banking on your shiny new toy. What if the new toy flops? If SE had shut down FFXI prior to the diasastrous launch of FFXIV 1.0, the company would have gone bankrupt. All that time, the revenue from XI kept them afloat.

CoH was not their cash cow, it made 2% of their revenues. I love how you make long arguments while knowing nothing of what you're talking about.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

Profit is hard to define or rather it can't be looked at in isolation. Killing CoH means NCSoft can leave the North American market, 98% of their revenue is in Korea. So they can shut down their US offices, data centers, marketing, get rid of Korean personnel with N. America knowledge, Korean managers dealing with N. America and so on. Lot's of secondary costs that can be lowered or gotten rid of totally. Just saving the time and hassle (late hours, mis-communication, flight costs, etc.) of communicating with the North American offices may be worth it. So even if CoH was profitable in isolation, once you add in all those other North America costs that get saved it may very well be a loss. Either way NCSoft clearly didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Remus Shepherd]

Many flaws in your reasoning, but I'll pick at just one: The Paragon Studio employees weren't retasked to other games. They were unceremoniously canned.

The *only* thing NCSoft gained by shutting down CoH was server space, which is pretty cheap. In return they lost a $2.75M/quarter revenue stream, a dozen or so experienced developers, and the goodwill of millions of gamers. (Hundreds of thousands of people who actually played, plus a lot of bad publicity.)

At a minimum, they could have sold the game to a company that would have kept it running. Then they could have retasked their servers while pocketing a big cash infusion and avoiding bad press. But they were too short-sighted to even do that.

What's the Korean word for 'clusterfuck'? That's the best explanation for this whole fiasco.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[nedlohs]

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for

There's risk and opportunity costs though.

Capital invested in it might be able to generate more profit doing something else. Large cash flows relative to profits make for a large risk if the income side of the stream drops for some reason and the costs reductions lag.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[happylight]

People would leave very quickly if there're no new development in an MMO.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Talderas]

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

This is not an entirely true statement, unfortunately other events make it more muddy.

CoH cost $X and was bringing in $Y revenue for a profit $Z. If by applying those same $X dollars to Project K and generating $A revenue and $B profit, if $B > $Z it makes sense to close down CoH and invest in Project K.

Your logic only works in an environment where you have infinite resources and time. The real world has neither.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Remus Shepherd]

Killing CoH means NCSoft can leave the North American market, 98% of their revenue is in Korea. So they can shut down their US offices, data centers, marketing, get rid of Korean personnel with N. America knowledge, Korean managers dealing with N. America and so on. Lot's of secondary costs that can be lowered or gotten rid of totally. Just saving the time and hassle (late hours, mis-communication, flight costs, etc.) of communicating with the North American offices may be worth it. So even if CoH was profitable in isolation, once you add in all those other North America costs that get saved it may very well be a loss. Either way NCSoft clearly didn't want to deal with the hassle.

That's it exactly. But it still doesn't explain why they didn't sell the game to a company that would keep it running. That decision can only be described as short-sighted and evil.

Either way, I wouldn't trust any game NCSoft is running in America. They might close them down at the drop of a digital hat. Gamers outside of Korea should stay far, far away from anything NCSoft tries to sell.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Guppy06]

You can't shut down your cash cow just because you're banking on your shiny new toy.

Why not? It works for Wall Street! Oh, wait...

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Emerssso]

Profit is hard to define or rather it can't be looked at in isolation. Killing CoH means NCSoft can leave the North American market, 98% of their revenue is in Korea. So they can shut down their US offices, data centers, marketing, get rid of Korean personnel with N. America knowledge, Korean managers dealing with N. America and so on. Lot's of secondary costs that can be lowered or gotten rid of totally. Just saving the time and hassle (late hours, mis-communication, flight costs, etc.) of communicating with the North American offices may be worth it. So even if CoH was profitable in isolation, once you add in all those other North America costs that get saved it may very well be a loss. Either way NCSoft clearly didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Doesn't NCSoft own Guild Wars 1 & 2 (one of which is practically brand new)? Shouldn't they still need offices in North America to support them? I'm confused about how they can manage Guild Wars in North America without offices and personnel.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Rakishi]

That's it exactly. But it still doesn't explain why they didn't sell the game to a company that would keep it running. That decision can only be described as short-sighted and evil.

Possibly no one was willing to buy it from them or the cost of a transition was judged as too high given the offers (removing proprietary code, transition servers, etc).

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[CronoCloud]

So it comes down to NCSoft not wanting to have to try to create/market/sell games that appeal to whatever the Korean word for "gaijin" is?

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[alvinrod]

CoH is so old that the servers they're using to run it will probably be retired. They're probably quite specialized for the needs of the game and anything new is going to offer an order of magnitude better performance. They could probably reduce the support staff at this point, or have them support multiple games. The player base that's sticking around at this point probably aren't griping or reporting bugs that they know will never get fixed anymore and there's no reason that the existing staff can't be transitioned to also work on another game.

As long as it was making money they should just keep it around. Some pencil-head MBA who has not actual understanding of the customer base probably made this decision. It's just going to alienate a lot of their longtime customers.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Kierthos]

Never attribute to evil that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[Rakishi]

There is no point in selling the pure IP (trademarks, copyrights to design,, characters, etc.) itself or to sell it soon, that can be sold at any point or reused later. It can be licensed for spin offs and so on. No maintenance costs so no need to sell ASAP.

That leaves the game which needs to be evaluated independently of the IP listed above (the IP value will be included in the cost of the whole thing).

Would you buy a game that was barely making a profit, probably expected to be losing money soon and with a minimum price large enough to cover ncsoft's transition costs (ie: ncsoft needs to move/sell server, data centers, deal with any code they own, any third party ncsoft services, etc)? You also need to pay enough to cover the pure IP value.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[UnknownSoldier]

> Shouldn't they still need offices in North America to support them?

ArenaNet, who developed Guild War 2, is in Washington
Paragon Studios, who developed CoH, was in California.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[flimflammer]

Was NCSoft developer or just publisher of CoH?

I know they still publish several titles in north america, Guild Wars 2 being an incredibly recent example.

Seems they still have a bit of vested interest in the market.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[argStyopa]

"If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down"

Then you don't really understand how business works.
Here's a hypothetical example:

Let's say you have business X, and it's making $2 million a quarter. You might think "$2 mill/quarter, that's great!"
Let's say you even have other businesses in Korea, making only $500,000/quarter.
Which do you close, considering you need to try to grow your company?

The point is, you CANNOT answer it with the above data.

If that $2 mill/quarter business has an invested capital of $20 million, and the $500k/quarter business is based on invested capital of $2 million, if you want to grow your business you are FAR better off shutting down the (ostensibly) more 'profitable' one to invest those resources in systems similar to the lower-profit (but better performing) operations.

I'm not saying NCSoft did the right thing here; I'm saying you cannot tell from this information.

Re:There's a reason SE hasn't shut down FFXI

[kannibal_klown]

Agreed.

Spending $X and investing Y resources (programmers, admins, etc) is returning Z per quarter. When with something else, those same dollars and resources might return more money per quarter.

It's like shelf space in a grocery store. Yes, you make a profit selling those raisins that occupy like 9" of shelf space. Each month you're making a little bit of cash.

But, if you replaced those raisins with Famous Amos cookies, you *might* bring in more of a profit each month. Of course, those cookies are more expensive to stock, so if it fails (like people in your neighborhood are health-fanatics) then you're out of luck.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Sydin]

I'd like to know the REAL reason for closing it down.

City of Heroes 2. Same reason Bioware/EA went out of their way to get Galaxies taken down just before the release of The Old Republic: they want to create a demand for a certain type of game, then provide it soon after.

Huh.

[Westwood0720]

I thought that game went down a long time ago. Lineage ][ still around? I thought I read at one point Lineage 3 would be released.

They Need To Be More Specific

[IonOtter]

"Strategic reasons" just does not cut it with this crowd, especially when it's your flagship product.

What's the REAL reason? Are they getting screwed by a patent troll? Did they get compromised by a breach and are bailing out before they get sued? Is the cost to running it more than the money they bring in?

All of my gaming friends who got sucked into MMOs all played CoH, they all still have active characters, and most of them juggle between WoW and CoH, or shift from one to the other on a seasonal basis.

And to a one, all of them are very upset over this.

Look, products come and go, favorite things get pushed aside for the latest, greatest and newest all the time. But when that one, single product is the foundation of your entire company, you'd better be ready with one heck of an explanation.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[seebs]

What on earth are you talking about?

CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[jandrese]

CoH was NCSoft's only "western" MMO. Everything else is Korean grindfests and lots of expensive Free to Play games. That's one of the big reasons it was shut down, because they didn't want to maintain the second development staff, second set of offices, second server farm, etc... to keep the game running.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[sandytaru]

Ah, now there's an answer. It's not "strategic" - it's a personnel issue. That makes a lot more sense.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[Nemyst]

You mean bar Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, their actual flagship games?

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[Remus Shepherd]

What on earth are you talking about?

CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.

They never saved CoH from being closed. CoH was never in danger of closing. The development team split, with half of them going off to make (the inferior) Champions Online, but the game was always profitable. NCSoft swooped in and bought it because it was worth money, not to 'save' anything.

CoH was nothing like a 'flagship', though. If anything, Guild Wars 1 was their flagship product in America. On the other hand, CoH was a constant revenue stream unlike GW1.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[bloodhawk]

flagship product? ummmm no. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean there are no good reasons to shut it down. It could be anything from hardware replacement costs were on the horizon to they think that allocating the resources from CoH to something else has the potential to make them a better return to they can see the writing on the wall with the dwindling population.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[jandrese]

Guild Wars is hardly a western MMO.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[Nemyst]

I don't know how more western a game can be than being made by an American developer under American leads using largely American and European workers.

Re:They Need To Be More Specific

[Tempest451]

"Western" meaning it's market would be primarily to a western audience. Where it is created is moot in an international market, where it sells the most is what's important.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[seebs]

Because they suck at running it.

Did you ever actually USE the "Paragon Market"? That was not developed by Paragon. It was developed by ncsoft (or someone else they hired). And it was spectacularly bad; like, I don't think I know anyone who does web development who couldn't probably do a better job in a day. Literally. Not hyperbole, not exaggerating. It was below the level of what you'd get if you went through a standard Rails tutorial.

So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.

I am pretty sure they will never sell it, because they don't want people to see just how incompetent they were.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[sp332]

The company is trying to move players over to another game. The whole point is not to let players keep playing this game, so they'll look for a new one.

Too bad...it was a great game

[SilverJets]

Played it years ago. Loved it. It spoiled me for when I then went to see what WoW was all about. CoH was light years ahead of WoW in every aspect from character creation, to UI, to game play. Loved playing a healer in CoH. Tried one in WoW and absolutely hated it. Here's a hint Blizzard...the act of healing should NOT draw aggro.

So long CoH and thanks for all the years of fun.

Re:Too bad...it was a great game

[Remus Shepherd]

Healing *did* draw aggro in CoH. It's just that Tanks in CoH were much, much better at pulling that aggro back onto themselves.

Hint to other games: If a character class is supposed to play a role, let them be the best ever at that role. There is no other game that has balanced yet indestructible Tanks like the ones in CoH.

Re:Too bad...it was a great game

[Xenx]

No offense, but the act of healing very much should draw aggro. You're telling me you wouldn't take out the guy keeping the rest of them alive? It's only logical.

Re:Too bad...it was a great game

[Megane]

Here's a hint Blizzard...the act of healing should NOT draw aggro.

Carebear casual. Seriously, some guy is beating on you, and every time you hit him back, some asshole wimp wearing a bunch of white shit keeps healing him? Wouldn't you want to give that other guy a nice hot cup of STFU if you were the monster?

FWIW, FFXI also causes aggro from healing. I wouldn't know if it works the same way as WoW because I've never played that. FFXI has both long-term hate that only decays as the monster gets to work out his anger issues on you, and short-term hate that decays automatically, for when you do something particularly annoying to the monster, shit like excessive healing or spamming spells. If you keep it low and slow, you won't annoy it enough to turn, but if you drop a massive cure bomb, you gonna get smacked. I've tanked more than a few times as White Mage, some of them intentional.

Re:Too bad...it was a great game

[srmalloy]

There are untold hordes of Immunes Surgeons would and Rikti Guardians who would nod sagely at this if they hadn't been the first ones face-down on the ground when combat started.

Re:Too bad...it was a great game

[SilverJets]

Maybe they changed it after I stopped playing but when I played it never seemed to draw aggro. I used to stand in the middle of combat next to the tank, healing the team and never took a hit...ever.

In WoW I could stand half way across the room, pull a single heal and watch the mobs decide I was the better target than the guy pounding on them. Long cast times, and too much aggro made being a healer in WoW not fun at all.

And why did they cancel Firefly?!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

NERD ANGRY!!!!!!!!!!

Re:And why did they cancel Firefly?!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's not the same thing.

When they canceled Firefly, it meant that I wouldn't get any new episodes.

This would be as if they canceled Firefly *and* made my existing DVDs stop working, so I can't even watch the old episodes any more.

And this is not just an MMO issue. This will happen to *every* DRM game, sooner or later. The entire games industry is no longer selling products, it's renting them, and the only reason people haven't realized it is that we're too soon in the process for it to really hit people where they live yet. (Unless they play NCSoft MMOs.)

Re:And why did they cancel Firefly?!?!?!?

[Githaron]

Once everyone realizes what's going on, I can see major amounts of lawsuits flying around and the lawmakers getting involved.

Re:And why did they cancel Firefly?!?!?!?

[hurfy]

...and not even a DRM issue if you like online play.

Many games use a matchmaking service like gamespy that may turn it off after whatever the contract period is.
Don't get why they DID tho (flatout2 and quite a few others). Now we hate on gamespy. They have a huge setup for doing just this and matchmaking for the ones shutdown would barely be a blip on their server logs. Seems the goodwill would have been worth it.

Re:And why did they cancel Firefly?!?!?!?

[Rakarra]

Many games use a matchmaking service like gamespy that may turn it off after whatever the contract period is.

Uuuuggghh. Getting Heroes of Might and Magic 3 working after the online services they partnered with went down was super-frustrating. Horrible Windows DirectX networking (yeah, there's a "Direct" network protocol) that was firewall-hostile, a Gamespy client that made a half-hearted attempt at using the defunct network protocol... I yearned for Diablo 2's direct TCP/IP option -- at least that was straightforward to poke holes in the firewall.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Enderandrew]

Galaxies was maintained and owned by Sony. Bioware/EA had no control over Galaxies, though it already had a massively declining subscriber base even before SWTOR was announced.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[jandrese]

The only problem with the CoH2 theory is that NCSoft always hated CoH, especially after the game went over with a resounding thud in the Korean market. They tried to add new grind mechanics to appeal to the Korean playerbase, but there just wasn't any traction.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[OrangeTide]

That's right. Players will be very encouraged to take up a new game, spends hundreds of hours building up characters, only to have everything throw away in a few years when the next big game comes out. It's sort of the opposite of building brand loyalty.

True, but...

[KingSkippus]

This is true, we always knew that the game would shut down at some point. However...

The MMO genre of game is especially conducive to getting people to invest enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into the product. The average City of Heroes launch day veteran has probably spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on this game, many much more. And many have spent thousands of hours playing--not just mashing buttons, but coming up with creative stories, even contributing to user-generated content areas such as the Mission Architect system that allowed players to create their own custom enemies, contacts, mission objectives, dialog, etc. In other words, what NCsoft doesn't realize is that at this point, we have just as much stake in the game as they do (some would argue more), yet they hold the ultimate authority to unilaterally declare, "Okay, game over, we're going to destroy years of your effort and a large monetary investment." Not because the game wasn't making money--it was--but because they're undergoing a corporate "realignment".

Not only that, but in the process, they laid off over 80 employees at Paragon Studios, the Mountain View, California development studio that built and maintained City of Heroes. Before the shutdown announcement, a group of employees and investors tried to acquire the IP from NCsoft to keep the game running, but NCsoft wouldn't sell it. After the shutdown announcement, thanks to the SaveCoH movement, another attempt was made, but again, NCsoft wouldn't play ball, even releasing a statement that they had "exhausted all options" in trying to sell the game. Excuse me? Exhausted all options? They hold the IP. Now that the shutdown has come and gone and the community has largely dispersed, practically speaking, it's worth zero. It's impossible for them to have "exausted all options" unless and until the ink is dried on the page transferring the game and its IP to another company or organization that can run it.

Not only that, but this isn't the first time that NCsoft has done this. This is the fifth game in as many years. Auto Assault. Exteel. Dungeon Runners. Tabula Rasa. Now City of Heroes. Clearly to me, the company is an MMO killer. The players of City of Heroes aren't the first group of people to have their hard work and investment destroyed, and apparently, NCsoft doesn't really care very much that it's systematically destroying communities and the output of people's creative expression. As a gamer, why the hell would I ever want to buy a game like Guild Wars 2 or any of NCsoft's other games? Answer: I wouldn't, and they won't be seeing any money from me again.

So does NCsoft have the legal right to shut down City of Heroes, lay off everyone at Paragon Studios, and carry on as if nothing happened even though the company's own investor relations statements indicate that the game was steadily profitable and it had the overwhelming support of its development staff and management? Sure, no one is disputing that. However, I do firmly believe that NCsoft, and MMO game companies in particular, have an ethical obligation to do everything they can to plan for a game's sunset ahead of time and be willing to release the game property to another company or third-party organization willing to take over running it if one is willing to (which, in this case, there were multiple parties interested in doing so). To not do so shows an immense amount of disrespect for your customers, and you run the risk of generating the negative publicity and outcry such as the one NCsoft is facing right now.

Re:True, but...

[UnknownSoldier]

> what NCsoft doesn't realize is that at this point, we have just as much stake in the game as they do (some would argue more),

You are 100% correct. Sadly, business (& artists) just don't understand the aspect of "community".

The game without its players is just a ghost in code. Likewise, you could have the greatest movie ever, but without anyone seeing it, parody it, it wouldn't really mean anything.

Part of the problem is that we are moving into a new paradigm -- "Community Content Augmentation." Why do games that support user-made custom maps / levels tend to stick around YEARS after? Because people love to "play" in that particular universe.

i.e. Person X or Company Y produces a product. It is popular. The community _expands_ and _adds_ to it. Even more players buy the "product" because there is a _wealth_ of community content. In on sense "ownership" of the game has partially transferred to the community who bring extra value to it. Valve learnt this long ago when almost anyone could run a game server. The Steam Workshop is a fantastic modern way to help give what consumers what: more (original) content ! When you have a rating system then one can filter out the S/N.

Slashdot is the same paradigm. Anyone is allowed to add to the discussion. Ignoring the fact that trolls "subtract" from the discussion, /.'s wealth is the user content ALONG with the ability to filter / prioritize it.

Blizzard _partially_ understood the value of community when they allowed UI Mods. Now, some of the best mods are built into the game. That is a Win-Win for everyone.

Sadly, too many MMO companies just don't understand the value of community.

It would be interesting to have the facts from the other side of the story -- how much was the revenue, profit and expenses for CoH ?

Re:True, but...

[desdinova 216]

sadly, we'll probably never know, since the only people who know are in Korea

Re:True, but...

[Chas]

Sadly, too many MMO companies just don't understand the value of community.

Yeah. That was one of the great things about Paragon Studios. They DID understand the value. These guys went out of their way to make sure we knew how much they understood and appreciated the community.

Too bad their parent company were a bunch of oblivious morons.

Re:True, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So they laid off 80 people on a game that was bringing in ~$2.5m in revenue every quarter, or ~$10m/year.

If those 80 people had an average total cost of just $125k (not hard to do once you figure in benefits, and software and California) then that is all of the revenue for CoH.

Why are people surprised this was shut down again?

Re:True, but...

[srmalloy]

So they laid off 80 people on a game that was bringing in ~$2.5m in revenue every quarter, or ~$10m/year.

If those 80 people had an average total cost of just $125k (not hard to do once you figure in benefits, and software and California) then that is all of the revenue for CoH.

$2.73M profit a quarter, not income. That's after deducting all of the support and development costs. The profit from City of Heroes was something like 40% of NCSoft's North American profits, although it was only about 2-3% of the entire company's profits.

Re:True, but...

[KingSkippus]

- $15 per month for 8 years, 2 months = $1,470. Plus around $120 to $150 for the initial purchase and major expansions, and that puts you around $1,590 to $1,620 just for owning the game with one account. The average launch day veteran actually probably spent a lot more than that. Count in around an additional $40 or so for collector's editions, $100 for various add-on packs, $100 to $200 for microtransactions, and it's easily upwards of $2,000. If someone has two accounts, double all of that. If someone paid airfare and hotel costs to attend a convention or Player Summit, that could easily add between $500 and $1,000 almost at a minimum. Multiple trips, multiple outlays of cash. Run a fan site? Hosting costs, domain name registration, etc. could easily run up a few hundred bucks more. The average launch day veteran spent $1,500 to $2,000 on the game. A few might have spent less if they paid by the year and didn't buy any expansions or add-on packs. A few might be in the neighborhood of $10,000. So whatever math you're using, you're way off.

- First of all, you'd have to be pretty dense to have so many people claiming first-hand and second-hand knowledge of these negotiations and yet still believe that they didn't happen. You sound like the idiotic birthers who still don't believe that Obama was born in Hawaii in that there is no standard of "proof" that you will accept as real. Second of all, I defy you to explain why millions are required to be ponied up to acquire the game. Frankly, you sound like an NCsoft shill, given that they put out a statement halfway through October saying that they had "exhausted all options" in selling the game. Um... Really? I have a 5-year-old Honda Accord that I'll sell you for $100,000. It's even in pretty good shape. What? You don't want to buy it? Well, I guess I've exhausted all options in trying to sell my car then, and it's really your fault for not ponying up the arbitrarily hugely inflated price I pulled out of my ass. No, actually I call it being damned greedy and disingenuous, and completely disrespectful of people making good faith offers and screwing over your customers.

- I'm not even going to dignify the claim that the game wasn't making money or stable with a response. It's already been addressed by the Korea Times article and thoroughly debunked in other venues. Again, you either don't know what you're talking about or you're deliberately misrepresenting facts to troll.

I take it you're one of the forum trolls that was naysaying the crap every step of the way? Because you're spouting their party/propaganda line almost word-for-word, and you clearly either have no clue what you're talking about, or worse, you do and you're deliberately misrepresenting the truth to troll people.

Etc... etc... indeed.

As for the "tempest in a teapot," it's gotten national attention from several high-profile names, made virtually all gaming journalism sites of note, even hit the radar of mainstream news organizations like CNN and CNBC, and now there's a blisteringly negative article about them plastered on the front page of the Money section of one of the largest Korean news sites right in their own back yard. I'm not sure how much publicity you consider something to have needed getting before you consider it more than a "tempest in a teapot," but to most people, that's a pretty damn significant uproar, especially given the topic at hand.

Re:True, but...

[Chas]

The only way to have spent the amounts of money you cite are to either have played since launch, or to have multiple accounts.

1: $50-100 for a disk and the first month of play.
2: $50-100 for City of Villains and a month of play.
3: $130-ish for various Super Booster packs pre-freedom
4: Additional server slots here and there ($6 for 1, $10 for 2, or $20 for 5). And after 8 years you're going to have a LOT of alts. The game ENCOURAGED alting.
5: $150*8.5 for sub fees.

Without buying a single server slot and foregoing the purchase of Paragon Points after Freedom launched, that's $1505. The equivalent of $2/day

Some people spent quite a bit of disposable income on CoH post-Freedom too. For years, the community was going "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" asking for new stuff. Freedom gave people an outlet for that cash surplus.

And I know multiple people with multiple accounts. Several of the "outliers" had 7 or more. One of the people I regularly teamed with had 7 accounts. And played on all of them regularly.

Let's not even get started on what the actual "average" for players was.

While there has been endless talks between people "interested" in doing so. There's no actual evidence that anyone was ever actually going to pony up the millions required to acquire the game.

Actually. I was one of the people approached to work for financing a new studio. The amount being asked for, and the way NCSoft responded to the notion of a buyout made it quite clear that they weren't interested in selling at that point. FACT.

Yes, the game was currently making (small amounts of) money - but the subscriber base has been declining for years (peaking, IIRC, about the time of COV's launch). Even going "free to play (but costs to get everything) didn't alter the downward curve. It wasn't going to be making money for very much longer.

Part of the reason the returns were lower, compared to outlay was that the studio was financing a second development team for another project. So yes, straight-line profit out of the studio was down. This would have corrected once the project itself reached release. Also, what's the difference between the studio funneling money, under their owner's direction, into a new INTERNAL project and the owner taking the profits and funneling the money to a different subsidiary for development of another property?

Re:True, but...

[DerekLyons]

- $15 per month for 8 years, 2 months = $1,470. Plus around $120 to $150 for the initial purchase and major expansions, and that puts you around $1,590 to $1,620 just for owning the game with one account.

No shit Sherlock. I even pointed that out.
 

The average launch day veteran actually probably spent a lot more than that.

That's the average launch day veteran, not the average player veteran - now you're starting to move the goal posts away from your original statement.
 

Count in around an additional $40 or so for collector's editions, $100 for various add-on packs, $100 to $200 for microtransactions, and it's easily upwards of $2,000. If someone has two accounts, double all of that. If someone paid airfare and hotel costs to attend a convention or Player Summit, that could easily add between $500 and $1,000 almost at a minimum. Multiple trips, multiple outlays of cash. Run a fan site? Hosting costs, domain name registration, etc. could easily run up a few hundred bucks more.

Are you for real? This is what you're calling average? You need to get an see the real world some mate, because you're seriously clueless about the difference between hardcore and average.
 

First of all, you'd have to be pretty dense to have so many people claiming first-hand and second-hand knowledge of these negotiations and yet still believe that they didn't happen.

I never said they didn't happen - I said they almost certainly weren't significant or serious. There's a difference between people claiming to have knowledge of the negotiations and actual evidence of serious or significant intent.
 

Second of all, I defy you to explain why millions are required to be ponied up to acquire the game.

If millions weren't required, then why were millions the figures being bandied about by the same people your rely on "evidence" of the seriousness of the negotiations?
 

I'm not even going to dignify the claim that the game wasn't making money or stable with a response.

Since that wasn't a claim I made... I fail to see your point. (Or once again you fail at reading comprehension.)
 

Again, you either don't know what you're talking about or you're deliberately misrepresenting facts to troll.

That's really amusing coming from someone whose only reply to the facts is incoherent sputtering and vigorous hand waving.
 

As for the "tempest in a teapot," it's gotten national attention from several high-profile names, made virtually all gaming journalism sites of note, even hit the radar of mainstream news organizations like CNN and CNBC, and now there's a blisteringly negative article about them plastered on the front page of the Money section of one of the largest Korean news sites right in their own back yard. I'm not sure how much publicity you consider something to have needed getting before you consider it more than a "tempest in a teapot," but to most people, that's a pretty damn significant uproar, especially given the topic at hand.

The "high profile names" are big fish in tiny little ponds, meaningless in the scheme of things. And of course it made the gaming "journalism" sites - it's the story of the week, and gone next week. There's no sign of it searching either CNN or CNBC... and "blisteringly negative"? You really need to get a clue - that's a puff piece, most of based on Lackey's propaganda.

Re:True, but...

[DerekLyons]

Without buying a single server slot and foregoing the purchase of Paragon Points after Freedom launched, that's $1505. The equivalent of $2/day

No shit Sherlock - that's exactly what I said. What you seemed to have missed is the difference between someone who has been around since launch day - and an average player.

While there has been endless talks between people "interested" in doing so. There's no actual evidence that anyone was ever actually going to pony up the millions required to acquire the game.

Actually. I was one of the people approached to work for financing a new studio. The amount being asked for, and the way NCSoft responded to the notion of a buyout made it quite clear that they weren't interested in selling at that point.

Again, cluelessness abounds - I never said people weren't approached. I said there was no evidence that anyone was going to pony up the required cash.

The problem wasn't the price NCSoft was asking, it was the starry eyed naivete of those organizing the buyout believing that they could do so at a fire sale price. And even if it was picked up for that, the cash outlay for purchasing the game plus the capital outlay for setting up the infrastructure would have been a figure that no intelligent businessman would pony up given the dim future prospects for the game. The playerbase was shrinking, and had been for years. Income was dropping (even after Freedom) and had been for years. There was and is no evidence that this is likely to reverse anytime soon, and was unlikely to ever happen at all.

Re:True, but...

[Chas]

What you seemed to have missed is the difference between someone who has been around since launch day - and an average player.

Ah. You're talking about the mythical "average player". Essentially the one with habits set such to allow you to "win" this argument.

Sorry, that bag was old before even *I* got into the game.

I'm talking about an average ACTIVE player in CoH. A surprising majority of them were multi-year subscribers. Driving the MATHEMATICAL average up.

And a surprisingly large minority were rocking multiple accounts for one or more years.

Plus you're still COMPLETELY ignoring the cash shop as if it didn't make any money for the game. Guess again.

Again, cluelessness abounds - I never said people weren't approached. I said there was no evidence that anyone was going to pony up the required cash.

And I'm telling you that you're mistaken. Believe it, disbelieve it. I have better things to do than argue with someone who doesn't know what they are talking about as if they were an authority on the matter.

Re:True, but...

[KingSkippus]

I don't have time to respond to trolls, but I'll just point this out. From my OP above:

The average City of Heroes launch day veteran has probably spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on this game, many much more.

And then from your post:

The average launch day veteran actually probably spent a lot more than that.

That's the average launch day veteran, not the average player veteran - now you're starting to move the goal posts away from your original statement.

Yeah. Moving those goalposts... I'll read the rest of your post some other time, but if this is how it starts, I'm not feeling very encouraged that it will provide much insight.

very sad to be reading this

[zuki]

Difficult to comment without having the inside scoop, but "sudden-death-by-beancounter" seems to be an increasingly common ailment in the electronic age.

Was either deemed superfluous, not worthy of the time, and I can hear the famous "can we just move on to focus on the core IP development" from the accounting department.

All arguments in which players having developed an emotional bond and deep attachment to the game has little if no place at all anymore; even though ironically that was the very thing the developers tried to elicit from customers at the start of the project. But in corporate terms, this has no place in any company's strategy.

Chew'em up, spit'em out. Any questions?

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[NewWorldDan]

They said that it's a strategic decision. No one said it was a good strategy.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[whereiseljefe]

It's weird though, they shut down City of Heros ostensibly for this reason, but they keep Guild Wars 1 up and running and still doing special events (and still no subscription fees).

Yes, 'Strategic reasons'. Yes, it's stupid.

[Remus Shepherd]

As a player of CoH I've been watching this all unfold for months, and it's just sad on every level. Obviously sad for the players and developers, but there's a greek tragedy that is looming over NCSoft as well.

The 'strategic reasons' that caused NCSoft to shut down CoH is that they just don't understand the product -- an easy-to-play game friendly to casual players with little or no PvP content. That kind of thing doesn't sell in Korea and doesn't make sense to NCSoft's Korean masters. They have made a decision to consolidate their games along the Korean 'grind-and-PvP' model, possibly with a centralized game store using common currency, as some other large game producers have done. CoH could not be adapted to that model. Advertising in America would be additional cost for a marketing department that only understands Korean game culture. So they decided to effectively pull their games out of America and focus on what they know best back at home.

It's a strategy, I guess. They'll still sell games in America, but they'll be anglicized versions of Korean grindfests with little or no marketing. GW2 is a prime example...and the players there are beginning to understand that, with the GW1 gameplay replaced by ridiculous grinds and a 'pay to win' cash market, not to mention characters from the korean alphabet creeping into the American version of the UI.

Frankly I wouldn't trust NCSoft to keep any game alive in the Western market, not now and not for another year. They don't want to do business here. They don't want to make the kind of games that casual players enjoy. They want to have a stable full of Lineage clones, and cutting off a profitable CoH is the first step towards that strategic goal.

It's just a tragic display of hubris. They were even too short-sighted to consider selling the game. Just sad, all around. RIP, Paragon City. I'll remember you for letting me be a hero.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Todo Proudfoot]

True that Sony maintained Galaxies and that Bioware/EA had no control over Galaxies BUT the previous person was right. SWG was shutdown specifically because of TOR. LucasArts owned the rights to both and didn't want SWG competiting with TOR.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Xphile101361]

Except that Guild Wars is still running even after Guild Wars 2 has been released.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[srmalloy]

So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.

NCSoft has lost face already. Their stock value has been sliding since the day of the Unity rally on the Virtue server, and their stock sank another 7.8% after the release of the Korea Times article questioning the business acumen of shuttering the game in the first place.

Without access to the reasoning behind the decision, I have no way to be sure why they decided to close the game -- particularly with it making a profit of about $2.75M a quarter -- but I believe that it was done to conceal the fact that they were already demonstrating their incompetence. NCSoft has brought to the Western market a number of MMOs rooted in the style of the games that are their bread and butter in the Asian market, with a heavy emphasis on grinding for rare drops, patronage of the in-game store, and PvP. That these games kept doing poorly and getting closed (Aion having shown "disappointing performance" in the last quarter), while City of Heroes -- almost the antithesis of the Korean style of MMORPG -- kept making a steady profit created the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market at a time when they were making an effort to become a major online gaming provider. With the ugly counterexample gone, NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[SilentStaid]

It's called Functional Obsolescensce and it's been a design method since GM pioneered it back in the early days of Detroit. It's worked out pretty well for those businesses (bailouts aside.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolescence#Functional_obsolescence

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[srmalloy]

The company is trying to move players over to another game. The whole point is not to let players keep playing this game, so they'll look for a new one.

When Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa shut down, players were offered free time in some of NCSoft's other games. No such offer was made to the City of Heroes playerbase. Although, frankly, given the stink we raised about the shutdown, I'm not really surprised that they didn't extend such an offer, although it wouldn't have been very practical -- Aion is "Completely Free", so we could already have just moved over to that game, Blade and Soul wasn't out yet to move players to, and the Lineage and Guild Wars MMOs were all 'buy the box, play free', which would have pounded their bottom line by eliminating the game purchase from their income.

Re:Cash Cow?

[Remus Shepherd]

Guild Wars 2 is not a subscription game -- players buy the game once and then play forever.

In 2008, players in City of Heroes were paying $15/month to play. That changed when they went free-to-play, but the population went up significantly at that time.

CoH was a reliable, if small, revenue stream for NCSoft. GW2 was a cash infusion that won't repeat itself until they release an expansion, and then probably at far reduced amounts.

I'd describe neither as 'cash cows'. But CoH *was* reliably profitable.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[Megane]

the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market

So instead, they closed it and removed all doubt.

Re:Cash Cow?

[lordofthechia]

City of Heroes had a recurring monthly payment (just like WoW, Rift, Everquest I, or most non Free to Play MMOs). Guild Wars 2 has no additional recurring cost (and therefore recurring revenue) past the initial game purchase (though they have released expansions for GW1).

So it's entirely possible 100,000k City of Heroes subscribers would be more profitable than 400,000 Guild Wars 2 players when looked at a period of 4-6 months past launch.

Furthermore, there is a value to maintaining your community up to (and even slightly past) the release of the next version of the game the community was formed over (see Blizzard maintaining Starcraft I for over a decade).

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Guppy06]

In contrast, Square-Enix plans to release their revamp of Final Fantasy XIV and an expansion pack for Final Fantasy XI next year.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Chas]

What if "not even close"? Even accounting for a second development team on a new project that had brought no money in yet.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Chas]

I'd like to know the REAL reason for closing it down.

City of Heroes 2. Same reason Bioware/EA went out of their way to get Galaxies taken down just before the release of The Old Republic: they want to create a demand for a certain type of game, then provide it soon after.

Nope. Matt Miller, the senior developer at NCSoft has repeatedly said that NCSoft shot down the idea of CoH2 numerous times.
And, as the game sank like a stone in the asian market, it's doubtful that they were going to build sequel to it with another in-house studio.

Re:Cash Cow?

[Petron]

City of Heroes went Free-to-Play months (maybe even a year) ago. F2P accounts were limited to number of characters and such (unlock more with micro-transactions). P2P accounts earned Vet rewards and and had much more unlocked.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[CronoCloud]

Same goes for Japanese developers...they just don't "get" the American market these days. In the old days, on consoles anyway, they didn't have fair competition, Nintendo and Sega obviously showing favor to fellow Japanese companies.

Now...they actually have to compete with top of the line formerly PC centric US and EU dev houses and they just can't do it.

Look at Sqaresoft/Square-Enix and FFXI, it came out after the lessons that could be learned from SCEA's EQOA (done by American team) and they still got it all wrong! It is actually less fun to play than EQOA was. Fucking SOE/SCEA's Free Realms is a more fun MMO than FFXI is.

I haven't played FFXIV, but hear it's an even WORSE grindfest than FFXI.

Re:Yes, 'Strategic reasons'. Yes, it's stupid.

[Remus Shepherd]

I believe that NCSoft's decision to retool to the Korean-only market came too late in the development cycle of GW2 to just cancel it. They're going to suck all they can out of that game then abandon it. I agree with you that Arenanet is in the same position as Paragon, and I sympathize with them.

The cash shop in GW2 allows purchase of gems, which translate to inventory space, bank space, character slots, and gold to buy anything you want in the in-game auction house. I don't know how you leveled so fast in GW2; I gave up at about level 30, when I realized that crafting was useless at my level, I didn't have the gold to buy the weapons I needed to survive solo, and my character would never again gain another interesting power. It's a grind that requires real-world money to have an efficient character. If that kind of gameplay was true to GW1 I'd understand it, but GW1 was extremely casual friendly. GW2 is a cash grab, and I fear that NCSoft was involved in making that way.

So they want more Lineage II users?

[sethstorm]

Not only is it a grindfest, bots run rampant in the game due to the general lack of attention by GM's/HGM's to do anything effective.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[UnknownSoldier]

> NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.

I disagree. Part of the problem is that NCSoft has traditionally had shitty UI design and implementation along with some bone-headed game design principles. (i.e. The retarded Shaman's Rookery jumping puzzle in Guild Wars 2 http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shamans_Rookery )

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for the last few weeks and the UI is such an ass-step backwards compared to other MMOs that the game is exceedingly frustrating because of it. They haven't learned that the bar has been significantly raised and they are being left behind. This is one of the _few_ things WoW did _right_.

There are 3 hurdles MMOs need to overcome:

* Tech
* Good Game Design & Positive User Experience
* UI

Almost everyone understands how to implement the tech now-a-days so that is (usually) a non-issue.

I believe User Interface plays a larger part in the success of a MMO then people give it credit for. Why? Because it is THE _primary_ interface with how one interacts with the game. If you are constantly fighting the game's UI are you really going to "put up with it in the hopes that the game is fun?" The answer is usually no. EVE Online suffers from this -- the game is fun -- BUT the learning curve is a fucking vertical cliff. Most people are not prepared to "learning a 2nd job" just to play the game to RELAX.

Good Game Design is not enough these days when there are other games that involved less grinding, and are more fun. GW2 is 50/50 hit/miss.

Here are some of the few things GW2 did RIGHT:

+ Shared XP and instanced-resources. No longer do you have to worry about somebody ninja-killing or ninja-looting. This encourages people to work together and help each other out -- as there is no penalty for doing so. I wish every MMO did this.

+ Another positive thing GW2 nailed was dynamic world events. Again, I wish every MMO did this.

+ No monthly fee! There is no pressure to "log on" this month because you are being nickled and dimed. You play whenever you want, anytime.

+ Fast patching system.

Example of Negative User Experiences:

- MMOs suck because someone else ninja'd your name. At least in WoW you can use European glyphs with diacritics but in GW2 you are limited to ASCII characters. Even with being allowed to select a "first last" name option, MMO's are not interested in _streamlining_ what _players_ want -- the ability to identify with their characters - both during character creation and afterwards. We STILL are forced to play the idiotic "I registered my favorite nick name before you did!" in MMOs.

On the plus side, part of the charm of CoH was that players became deeply attached to characters that they could customize and look unique. GW2 is partially pushing the boundary here by giving people _some_ choices in looking unique with the (limited) dye'd colors more so then other MMOs.

- Your level is automatically downgraded per region if you are too high. This is one of those "Sounds good on paper, but shitty in practice" things. If a player is struggling to finish off a region they do not have the option of leveling up and coming back to it due to the idiotic "automatic level downgrade". ArenaNet's excuse is "We have no end game -- the whole game is challenging." I understand that logic but sadly GW2 becomes one boring grind-fest because of it.

- One example out of thousands of shitty UI in GW2. Whenever you play a different character it is listed first and all your characters are shuffled around. Diablo 3 did the same thing and everyone bitched at Blizzard to fix it. Which they did. How many YEARS have MMOs had to solve this -exact- problem and the dev's STILL don't "get it" with the common UI problems??

It is the _million_ little things of User Interface and User Experience

Very Sad

[jweller13]

I've been playing City of Heroes since 2006. It had absolutely the best MMO gaming community I've ever come across. If you've ever played it you know what I mean. Teaming was the essence of it's model. Pick-up-groups (PUGS) routinely can stick together throughout an entire evening of playing missions, PUGs! for goodness sake. And the team members actually talk with each other, and joke around constantly while playing. It also had a gaming engine where character moves and powers we're motion capture based and not the oh so artificial looking and cartoonish computer generated human motion. Also it had a very tightly connected feel when playing your "toon" as we call them. Most games have a very squishy disconnect feel between your keyboard and the toon. It really felt immersive. Also the game developers were incredibly responsive and receptive to and part of it's gaming community.It had it's shortcomings of course like any game. I literally welled up when I learned of its closing. Some folks don't understand the emotional connection some of us have to this game. It's something you have to experience and can't really be explained. Farewell City of Heroes you are sorely missed. :-(.......

sad

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

I have fond memories of this game when it first game out. I believe it was the first super-hero MMORPG.

Re:There were sex offenders playing that game.

[desdinova 216]

{citation needed}

Re:Yes, 'Strategic reasons'. Yes, it's stupid.

[DerekLyons]

Yes, grandiose conspiracy theories are sad... especially when they fly in the face of facts.

The fact is, CoH was a minor portion of their revenue - and that portion and the revenue was steadily dropping as CoH's subscriber base continued it's long decline. It was a year or so, at most, from going negative, to no longer being profitable.

Other game

[levest28]

There's a new browser MMO currently in beta that is made by an indie group by the name "Mechanist". Check it out guys, City of Steam :) http://www.cityofsteam.com/

MMO Incopentence

[TiggertheMad]

These MMOs are ultimately operating a service. Expecting them to operate it indefinitely is a bit naive.

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it? If it's a matter of getting it off the books and getting it off the executive radar, then spin it off into its own business as a wholly owned subsidiary. There are a lot of alternatives that don't amount to throwing a revenue stream in the garbage.

Yeah, I expect them to operate indefinitely actually. They are basically are running a service attached to a database that a client connects to. This should basically have an operating cost of keeping a server plugged in, which isn't much. If there are enough shards operating that it requires dedicated administration, then there is going to be enough income to support it. Unless the code was VERY poorly written, the only way that you aren't going to make a profit by keeping it plugged in is through management incompetence. (surprise surprise!)

Re:MMO Incopentence

[Nostromo21]

Let's not forget hosting costs, ISP inet connection fees, web servers & services, customer service, designers, developers & testers, admin & support staff, corporate/business heads, etc, etc. I wouldn't even think about running a commercial mmo these days without most of those listed - you'd just be a very short-term laughing stock. It's big business. This is not a hobby any more & can't be run as such, except on wanky private UO shards & WoW rip-off servers, which are lucky to get 10 players online simultaneously at any one time.

A mmo has to be MASSIVE, first & foremost, and that's coming from a (mostly) solo carebear :). If I wanted to play a game in a dead, pre-scripted world, there's plenty of SP games out there. Or crappy droid games :-/.

If you read superhero comics...

[Tempest451]

This was the game you would be playing. Even after the other two came on the stage, City of Heroes was still the best out there for the genre. They had done amazing things graphically with it considering it had an 8-year-old graphics engine. The best part was the the developers who we as approachable as any player. The Devs listened to the community and made them a part of the games evolution. Some players could actually boast that features they suggested were actually in game because of them. The community even bought the Dev staff dinner after the news came out, that's how close they were. It was like family and you got to be a superhero!

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Githaron]

I have never played Guild Wars but why would they need to create a second game? Isn't the one of the good things about MMOs is that they are constantly evolving?

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[Kierthos]

The problem is that they closed City of Heroes, which had free-to-play and monthly subscription options... to what... make us play Guild Wars 2, which is free-to-play (after you buy the game), and has no monthly subscription fees?

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Re:Cash Cow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, buy once, play forever...with a p2w cash shop that's been ramping up the past months. So tell it all, not half.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Phrogman]

Go find your old SWG install disks. Visit the SWG EMU at swgemu.com and play SWG as of patch 14.1 :)

Well, its in beta, so there is only the 1 server (Basilisk) plus a test server, there is no Space content, the themeparks are only in development at the moment (Rebel and Jabba's are running I believe), Creature Handler isn't working, neither is Shipwright, Bio Engineer and there are no Jedi at all yet (some will see this as a bonus).
The game is playable though. Its legal, and its free. You do need the old install disks and some patience. If you are a C++ developer they are looking for volunteers to work on the code :)

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I don't doubt Galaxies was closed with some financial prompting in favor of Republic, possibly negotiayed in from day one.

Galaxies had been killed by the New Game Enhancements oh long johnson since. I know -- my master dancer woke up one day unable to use her blaster, and was limited to level 1 weapons. And I had an awesome house and my own cantina in a player city my friend was mayor of on Tattoine.

Had CoH kicked players in the balls 3 years ago and few people had anything good to say about it, then that may be closer to the mark.

Also, where is this City of Heroes 2? Comic genre MMORPG lovers are dying here. Champions is an also-ran, and is part of the NCSoft axis of evil anyway? DC Universe Online is a hideous, console-oriented button mashfest. Upcoming Marvel Online is even worse, where you get to, er, are only allowed to "play your favorite Marvel characters online!" Driving off a cliff before the turd is even released.

Marvel, that should be a side game within a real game, which should not be a console mashfest because you are looking at larger console markets as statistical insurance of success.

Re:There were sex offenders playing that game.

[desdinova 216]

and I ask for citations again.

Re:Yes, 'Strategic reasons'. Yes, it's stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

GW2 is not pay-to-win. The pay-for items are all vanity items. You can buy experience boosters but they don't do you much good in PvP since your PvP build is max level the moment you roll up your character.

You're quite sure about that?

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[flimflammer]

Making $1000 over costs could be considered "making money", but that doesn't mean they weren't just basically breaking even anyway, or were making so little that it doesn't justify the staffing requirements and work to keep it going.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[srmalloy]

Guild Wars 2 is a bad example; that was developed by Arenanet here in the US, not by NCSoft.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

My thugs/traps Masterming could have solo'd the whole damned company, South Korean military included.

Re:Cash Cow?

[stymy]

Keep in mind that in GW2 you can buy gold directly from NCSoft, as well as some exclusive items. I'd wager the average regular player may end up spending more per month than the average cost of a subscription, as there's plenty of people that have spent hundreds of dollars on gold and items already.

Champions Online

[Wandering Voice]

If I recall City of Heroes is an comic book themed MMO. I had always wanted to play it, but I was under the impression that it was subscription based so I avoided it. I like the MMO genre and am currently playing Champions Online (F2P). I don't expect the world to last for ever, even when I do invest some cash into the game. One of the reasons though, that I will consider spending cash for, is that Champions Online is also based on the pencil & paper RPG. The servers may shutdown, but I will always have my character and as long as my boys and other friends play, I will always have access to the world. And I find traditional RPG games to be far richer than computer aided games, but on the other hand they are much slower to play and require a good crowd.

black sheep of MMORPG

[hurfy]

How about Everquest's (original) competitor Asheron's Call. Never as successful but still hanging on.
However the amount of content is a bit mind-numbing after 13 years of monthly updates...so like update 140 now :O

Sounds a bit premature if they weren't losing money yet. Been there....Motor City Online only made it 2 years? there were hundreds of people ONLINE when they shut it down :( Was upsetting to spend a year learning how to build my cars and get shut down just when you master it....

Re:Cash Cow?

[Remus Shepherd]

City of Heroes had a cash shop also. Not as mandatory for the PvP-based GW2, but I consider the comparison a wash. CoH players spent more cash on costumes than GW2 players spend on elite equipment.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[simp7264]

Bioware/EA had no control. But Lucas Arts certainly did. It has been confirmed the only reason SWG closed was because Lucas didn't want to extend the license and have 2 Star Wars MMOs at the same time.

SWTOR killed SWG period.

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[doesnothingwell]

obvious money to be made, yet a company seems to have no interest in making it.

Its a Disney or Time oldies like thing, put IP back in the "vault" and drag it out later when its covered in yummy nostalgia. In another 50 yrs Pacman is really gonna be worth a shitload.

I don't get it...

[CODiNE]

If it's profitable, and people want to keep it around, why hasn't someone bought it off them?

They just want to kill it? No sale considered?

Could someone kickstarter this? The product is DONE, they could just buy the software and code for ohhh... a few million. Give the people who buy into it 6 months free, then open source the thing and keep it alive.

Re:I don't get it...

[palndrumm]

Officially, NCSoft tried to sell it but failed - they released a statement on October 2 saying that: "We’ve exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful." The #SaveCoH community is profoundly skeptical of this, to put it mildly.

Unofficially, various parties have reported that their attempts to contact NCSoft to discuss the possibility of a sale never got anywhere - their emails, phone calls and letters all went unanswered. Bottom line is, so far there's been no indication that NCSoft want to do anything other than kill off CoH completely. If they let it be known that they'd be willing to sell it for just a few million, there'd be several interested buyers, or at the very least a heavily promoted (and I suspect heavily supported) Kickstarter campaign running right now.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[firex726]

Does not seem very likely...
Speaking as someone working for a large host, one of our largest customers, a re-seller had some 3000 servers with us, and were paying around $2m/mth.

That would still leave them with 1000 possible servers to host the service on.

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[geminidomino]

Far different games.

In the three months since release, ArenaNet has basically denounced all of their big "in development"/"pre-release" design philosophy in favor of a more "mainstream" approach (vertical gear progression, direct interference with the in-game "economy", gated content) and most efforts feel like their angled toward making the real-money shop a requirement rather than a convenience.

Beyond the backstory and the title, GW2 has almost nothing in common with Guild Wars.

Re:Come on, u knew this was an MMO

[Anonymous Coward]

A sign of the apocalipse, no doubt.

FTFU

Re:Cash Cow?

[qwe4rty]

p2w = Pay to Win? If so, I fail to see how anything in the GW2 shop is "pay to win". Yes GW2 has a cash shop, but that is not intrinsically a bad thing. You are not forced to use it. Heck, you can convert the ingame currency to "gems" which is the cash shop currency and never need to spend a dime.

Re:Cash Cow?

[qwe4rty]

Two things: I wouldn't call GW2 "pvp-based". It's pretty lacking in major features. Secondly, I can't think of anything that pvp-players need to buy from the cash shop. It's the opposite of mandatory

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[TheLink]

I've never played CoH. But who is going to buy CoH2 after they screwed CoH like that?

It's still making money! Just keep it going. If your new game is good enough, people will jump to it, and your old game will start losing money. You prepare the players and developers for the end (say shutting down in X months). Set up an epic end of the world battle against some big villain (have it repeat every X hours- since servers WILL crash), then big villain wins, everyone dies, then have a "heaven/credits scene"- big party, fireworks etc. Everyone has closure - players, developers etc. They move to the new game or find something else. There will still be complainers but nobody that matters to your bottom line will care.

Do it well and it could be considered as marketing for the new game. After all wouldn't you be more inclined to spend $$$ and time in their new game if their old game ended well?

Re:Garrrrrrghhh nerd rage

[TheLink]

They can't easily change GW1 to be what GW2 is like.

They are very different games. Many GW1 players still prefer GW1 to GW2. I'd say the more casual players of MMOs like WoW might like or even prefer GW2.

In GW1 you can go around doing PvE with your private custom army using heroes and mercenaries - which can be fun for some people. You can assign skills to heroes and control them. The gameplay mechanics are different. It can be quite technical too. You can only have 8 skills at a time, but there are hundreds to choose from, and many are very powerful, and a number are pretty interesting in the effects (it's not the boring "heal, big heal" or "fireball, bigger fireball" that are common in many other MMOs[1]). Many GW1 skills would be overpowered in GW2's more massive PvP formats, or they won't work at those scales. So while GW2 is similar to GW1 in that you can only have 9 skills at a time (OK it's more complicated than that but...), the skills have to be different.

GW1 has significant flaws - you can't queue for PvP while doing something else interesting in game. So this causes many PvP formats to die due to lack of players (nobody wants to wait around indefinitely for enough people). The problem is it would not be easy to create such a feature, since the sort of skills you'd bring can differ a lot- different PvP or PvE. And some PvP formats require teams to have builds that work well together - you can't throw a random bunch of people together- if they all turn out to be healers they can't kill anything.

With GW2 there's no real healer class - everyone is responsible for their primary healing. So there's no healer to blame ;).

GW2 encourages players to help each other in PvE. GW1 is neutral to negative in this aspect -you can have your own private army, you don't need to team up with anyone else.

[1] Examples of interesting GW1 skills:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Visions_of_Regret
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Diversion
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Wastrel's_Worry
Use a skill get punished -get damaged or can't use it again for a long time. Don't use a skill get punished too.
Also: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shield_of_Absorption
The more the target gets hit the less damage the target gets.

Re:Come on, u knew this was an MMO

[germansausage]

+5 funny

Re:They could have at least handed it off to someb

[drsquare]

Allowing weird characters in names so no-one can type them is the worst thing a developer can do.