Zombie Man

What's a good offline reader for grabbing everything that's on the forums and the main website?

Still waiting for The Net to expose himself.

Oh my, fetch me a pancake.

Yes.

It will be said to watch them while we see movers removing everything in the background.

Why would NCSoft close a studio making a profit?

The usual answer has been that NCSoft lost money elsewhere in the company and this will help.

Ummm... odd. If it makes money, it makes money. Closing down a money maker doesn't help pay the bills. *Selling* off the studio makes money.

And so, my conjecture is this: Paragon Studios lost money. Not year to year, though. Year to year, it generated a surplus. But, that yearly surplus would never pay off the initial investment: Buying the IP and setting up a new studio cost big bucks. Paragon would never, at the rate it's going, make enough money to pay back the initial investment. It's like paying a million dollars for a machine that prints a one dollar bill per day.

Now, does that make NCSoft's decision any less stupid since a money maker is a money maker and the least it could do is reduce the amount of bad investment? No. But NCSoft does have a history that if a title can't make a yearly profit *and* pay off the initial investment... then it gets written off as a loss. Isn't that right, Tabula Rasa?

If CoH restarts development, then I'll let them out of my basement.

Meh, I did the initial work just to find bargains.

Thanks Chad for the upkeep and Snow Globe for you meticulous attention to detail!

The underside of PI is very clean. Whichever environmental artist made that did a great job. I liked comparing PI to the monstrosity that is Grandville where buildings exist within buildings. Grandville was the original graphics card killer because of that. And also because the giant TV monitors get drawn when you face them, even when other items block your view of them. That's why the area around the big statue of Lord Recluse was a huge FPS drain.

He worked at the publisher's (NCSoft's) corporate office. He visited the studio once and said "Goooood dayyyy!"

And that's the full extent of his involvement with CoH. For the first few years, Cryptic was in full control of content and policy and NCSoft just marketed it, published it, and did Community Support (the forums and GMs). Garriott was nominally in charge of all that. He was busy full time getting Tabula Rasa off the ground, rasa'd, and off the ground again. Then he went to space, which occupied him a bit. Then he fell to earth finding Tabula Rasa terminated by NCSoft and blaming him. Then he fully separated from NCSoft and sued them.

NCSoft became a bit hands-onsy when Cryptic (Jack) pared down the CoH staff to the Freem Fifteen (plus 5 support) and demanded that they put out at least three issues a year. Then when Cryptic (Jack) was pimping the studio around to make a CoH-killer with some other publisher, NCSoft bought out the IP and became very hands-on (that's when 'Production' started calling the shots and the Devs were subordinate and just in charge of art and content). Garriott was long gone when that happened.

There was *never* *never* *never* anything mentioned about a term limit on the leasing of the Cryptic game engine when NCSoft bought out the IP from Cryptic. *Never*.

Whoever was the first to say "5 years" pulled it out of their ***. Literally. And I mean just that: *literally*. Because their rectum was the only possible place that that number could have existed because it had *never* been mentioned before until yesterday.

*Never*.

Does anyone really think that NCSoft would buy out the IP and agree to a limited term leasing agreement?

If the game is going to be sold to another company, giving away all the assets free is not a good idea.

If you do delete them, the only way to make sure they're deleted for ever and you're really sticking it to the man is to email all your stuff first to @Zombie Man.