Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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.
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
NERD ANGRY!!!!!!!!!!
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.
They said that it's a strategic decision. No one said it was a good strategy.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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.
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.
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.
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).