I'm aware that Brian Clayton et al are trying to convince NCsoft management to not just shut down Paragon Studios but to do something else. But I can't see them succeeding. NCsoft wasn't interested in selling Paragon Studios - they announced the shut down and then looks like they locked almost everyone out of the offices. They don't appear to have shopped the studio / title around first, opting to just kill the title. And then even if NCsoft is convinced to sell everything as is (i.e. the IP, the people, the player accounts, etc.) who is going to buy? It's a MMO that has had no revenue growth in years. The MMO market is currently full of recently tanked projects like SWOR and TSW. Investors would be wary of taking on CoH/V under such circumstances.
Depending on what the cost is and what the business plan of the developers is, I can easily see someone buying it and running it as a small but profitable foundation. I know EVE Online started with a bigger publisher and then bought themselves out, struggled for a long time but are now fairly successful - obviously in a much smaller way than something like WoW is.
Who would buy the IP? Paragon and its investors. The people who develop the game. CoH is a sunk cost. The development is done and paid for. Sure, the revenue is flat but it's fairly consistent, suggesting that the existing playerbase, however small, is very loyal (something that CoH's developers have referred to multiple times in the past). It makes money, it doesn't lose it. The comparisons to Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World are off as those games both need to earn back their development cost, something CoH has already done. I agree it seems unlikely that NCsoft would sell but the fact that they are having discussions demonstrates that it is a possibility. I doubt they're talking just to be polite. :P Also, NCsoft and Paragon stopped calling it CoH/V years ago when the games were merged. It's okay to call it CoH now.
I'm pretty sure NCsoft/Paragon decided to merge them together once people started referring to the game as CoX rather than typing out CoH/V. "They're calling our game what? Cocks? No, that's shit is going to stop right the fuck now."
Yeah, but it didn't and it's annoying. Though in the world of gaming forum-isms, it's only one out of a whole bunch of obnoxious things. The people organizing their regular fan art contest called it the Fart Battle...
I hated calling it CoX and still use CoH/V to separate it from Company of Heroes. TSW and SWOR were mentioned to point out that the MMO market is under a lot of stress right now. A number of MMOs have closed this year or appear to be under financial stress. How many investors are willing to buy a good product in a bad market, when they could invest in a studio doing a DOTA-like or zombie-based title where the category at least looks like it has life in it? CoH/V might be a sunk cost, but it is still going to require an amount of captial to move the studio, rent a new location, new servers, new front-end systems (billing and customer support) and other kinds of costs. So any investors - which Paragon Studios has to find - need to be willing to pay whatever NCsoft negotiates (CoH/V earns roughly US$10m a year in revenue iirc) plus those set-up and relocation costs. And be willing to spend more on further development on a title that has seen a lot of extra development in the last 2 years but has seen negative revenue growth.
Dear god will someone PLEASE tell SOE that this would be viable on their roster. It wouldn't even dent the problems with DCUO they attract different people. They would eat the marginal server cost for breakfast, already have a shop up and with new players make the content for the store push it would be ideal for them to eat this IP.
Also, "It's profitable!" is not enough justification for anyone to take it on. It would need to be profitable enough to provide a rate of return on the cost of purchase that would be higher than all the other things the theoretical buyer could do with that money.
However, if a company is looking to get into the MMO business, one of those "other things" they could do with that money is "piss it away like 38 Studios" so buying City of Heroes might not be such a bad deal after all.
I'd imagine an 8 year old MMO isn't a super attractive prospect to very many people, though. If a buyer could just take over operation that's one thing, but how long would it take to become profitable when you factor in the cost of getting the game and the development studio up and running?
Were I in charge of Valve, you'd all be puppets for my amusement it would be cheaper to grab the existing dev team and tell them to make CoH 2.0, just not call it that. It could also help fix up a lot of the lore issues that have cropped up over the game's life.
NCsoft sticks a fork in it and declares it done. The likeliest scenario now would seem to be some hacked-together private servers.
The general consensus on this announcement is that it's a snow job - intended, primarily, to shut up the playerbase so that NC can focus on 'more important things'. TonyV, amongst others, has actually highlighted this as a sign that the publisher is, if not on the ropes, then at the very least worried, and to be honest, my sardonic and pessimistic nature aside, I find it easy to believe. Add to this the fact that NC's stock continues to plummet (outside of a tiny recent spike), even with the rampant success of Guild Wars 2 - and the recent purchase of a decent amount of stock by Nexon - and you have a recipe for a large number of shareholders throwing up their hands and saying, 'Welp! This company's piledriving itself, time to leave.'
I find it incredibly hard to believe that they thought an announcement like that would shut up the player base. They already announced the closure, so all this says is "Yep, still closing". The state of NC Soft as a whole is of no concern at all to the CoH players. They just want the game back.
Actually, there's a pretty big piece of text, sub and con, here - the claim that 'We've exhausted all options', which has as its subtext two things - that they've been trying to use those options, and/or that those options have been run through and discarded as unviable. Considering the viability of the IP, not to mention the simple fact that CoH was at the very least solvent, I would discard both as bald-faced lies, utter and complete bullshit, and all it says is that NCSoft is desperately trying to save face when there's an incoming onslaught of poisonous PR.
NCsoft probably politely listened to the offer put together from the ex-Paragon reps but never had any serious interest in selling the IP. If they had they would have gone about the shutdown differently. All I know is the impending end of the game has really killed my interest in playing it. I'm still going to rope MrPants into at least one more round, though. Tiny needs a new Halloween costume.
See, I don't get why they'd want to lie about anything, though. In the end, they're running a business and if they can make the game work, why wouldn't they? People keep repeating that CoH was profitable, but does anyone actually know how profitable? There's a significant amount of resources required to keep the game and its dev studio up and running, so I don't see any reason they'd want to shut it down if it was making bringing them a good amount of income. I just don't buy the prevalent community opinion that they're shutting down the game just to be jerks.
The general belief is that NCSoft is closing the game down to prove to the shareholders - after a year which has seen their stock drop at least 20% - that they're doing something. In corporate terms, regardless of whether movement is upwards or downwards, any movement seems better than none. As CoH was generally... well, stable, rather than substantially profitable, NC might have felt that they had little to lose by shutting down a tiny little nothing MMORPG - and they didn't count on the playerbase rising up like an angry nest of hornets. And now they're just trying to save face. [ ETA: Interesting side note. The Archive Team have pulled down the CoH Forums. The website, too, but that's not as much fun. ]
In the last four quarters, CoH/V earned about US$10m in revenue. However, I think fans are looking at the wrong thing in asking if CoH/V is profitable when they should have been asking if Paragon Studios is profitable. They reportedly had 80 staff and hadn't been able to get support for any second title from NCsoft (who were focused on Guild Wars 2, then Wildstar, according to those who had left the studio). So they weren't a nice cheap studio to run. The more I look at it (using a whole heap of cost assumptions, I admit), the more I believe that if Paragon Studios was profitable it wasn't by much and projections weren't good for how long that would last. On top of this, despite a boxed expansion and an conversion to F2P, CoH/V's revenue was on a downward track and had been since roughly 2007. They had a very low rate of player churn, but over five years that's still taken its toll. Some very rough calculations put them at having something like 50k - 60k paying subscriber equivalents with that figure also trending down. NCsoft appears to be in the mood to do a little bit of house clearing given recent financial adventures and the over-stuffed studio with only one declining title was an easy target. I also don't buy the vocal fan opinion that NCsoft has seen a drop in their share price because of angry internet yelling. They've certainly seen a drop since the very successful launch of Guild Wars 2, but I'd have to read a lot more financial information about the state of NCsoft before attributing any of the decline to CoH/V fans. At the very least, the last time I looked pretty much all video game companies had suffered on the sharemarket and NCsoft had held up better than most. I also don't see that message as saving face. If NCsoft wanted to sell CoH/V, they would have done it BEFORE announcing they were shutting it down. That message was simply, "We thought about it, and the answer is still no - don't hold out any hope", although a lot of people spent a lot of time picking through it looking for secret meanings. I'm also yet to see someone name a valid option for NCsoft to sell CoH/V to as well. NCsoft really could have handled the shutdown of Paragon Studios and CoH/V much better and for that they deserve criticism. However, what happened makes sense from NCsoft's point of view - CoH/V has failed to grow for 5 years and the money they spent on that particular title could be better used elsewhere.
This is quite the walkback from what you said before: It's almost as if you're prone to clinging to any narrative other than "COH's revenues had been sliding for a long time and a last-ditch F2P effort couldn't reverse that."
Don't forget that Paragon Studios was working on a second unannounced MMO for NCsoft. Many of the staff (if not most) had transitioned to the new game. Obviously NCsoft decided the new title wasn't worth the continued investment and it got the axe along with the rest of the studio.
If they were, then it was the third or fourth attempt to get a second title started. Part of it appears to be that Paragon Studios decided / was pushed into not starting another title until after GW2 launched, and then probably until Wildstar launched. Which retrospectively was a very bad idea, because it left them without a financial future in NCsoft HQ's eyes.
Er, it's no if. They had specifically moved key staff to the second project and were hiring more. The NCsoft jobs page (since wiped out) had multiple listings for Paragon for work on a 'next generation MMO'. Paragon had also confirmed that it was not related to City of Heroes. Development had been underway for at least a year when the axe fell. I'm kind of surprised you seem unaware of this.
I think what shocked most people was the fact that they cancelled everything all at once. It would have been a much softer blow if NCsoft had first cancelled the new in-development MMO, thinning staff and pushing some people back onto CoH to finish the next Issue, coasted for a few months and then started to slim down the CoH team and finally announced it closing. The "CoH is shutting down soon and by the way we are also shuttering Paragon, everyone is fired." way it appeared to fans was just too much at once.
Thus far I'm aware that they were working on: 2009-ish: CoH 2.0. Was cancelled. 2010/11-ish: Dark Modern MMO, like TSW. Cancelled. 2011-ish (to 2012-ish?)???: Something Minecraft-esque based on islands. Definitiely cancelled now that Paragon Studios is no more, but I don't know if another project came after this one. I did see comments today mentioned by Zwillinger that Paragon Studios was working on a title aimed at the casual hardcore (though he called it "the evolved hardcore gamer"). I've been seeing job ads for Paragon Studio hiring people for a "next generation MMO" since early 2010. But nothing has ever been formally announced so it is difficult to know what is what or how far they were along with it. So I admit I get a touch sceptical about where Paragon was with their next title.
I still have some old pics from back in the day. Not the best shots but they're something. Take a look at this handsome do-gooder! I got a lot of compliments (and one very spergy and angry rant) from this guy.
MrPants and I logged in for the final few hours with our first level 50 characters, his a fiery aura/super strength tanker named Tiny Iota and mine a storm summoning/energy blast defender named Angry Carrot. We did a few missions, most dating back to the game's launch in April 2004, including one of those infernal 'Find Person X' ones on the gigantic outdoor map that's sort of a cross between Kings Row and Steel Canyon. After that we ventured to Atlas Park for the last 15 minutes or so before the plug was pulled. We played on Triumph, which was not one of the more highly populated servers, and it had three instances of Atlas Park running. We stood atop City Hall in AP3 and did what any good heroes would do as the clock ticked away to our inevitable doom. We ate. A huge crowd gathered under the statue of Atlas. Appropriately the in-game day was changing to night. Darkness was falling over Paragon. Two admin messages appeared to countdown the inevitable. And then the last City of Heroes mapserver error ever. It actually came a few minutes after midnight. Maybe the admin was eating donuts, too. After getting forcibly disconnected I found myself back at the character screen. I backed out to the server select screen and looked over the list of grayed-out servers and it was weird to think they were gone for good. This was a game killed before it deserved to die and NCsoft gave it a pretty shoddy send-off. But the good times will always be remembered fondly. It was my first MMO and the one I could most reliably return to and still enjoy, right up to the very end. For all its flaws I am a little sad that it's gone now.
I remember Mercedes did a "Celeberty Guest Author" set of missions for Archetecht Enterainment Kind of nice in hindsight to think it really was enjoyment of the game and not just some kickback promotional stunt that prompted it.
