Brillig

And you accuse someone else of immaturity? With this?

Actually, it's very unlikely that any deal would include the physical servers.

If the purchasers were willing to use cloud servers, setting up the game servers could happen quite quickly (as in a week or so).

Setting up a new billing infrastructure would take some time though. But in theory, they could get the game running as a 'free beta test' for CoH 1.5 before they get billing going.

I think to this point, you're making a lot of sense.

However, I think this last part has drifted into wish-list territory that might tick off as many oldtimers as it makes happy.

It would also insert dev work into the middle of standing the whole thing back up, and I think that every day the game is dark is a very bad thing.

I don't think anyone thinks there's any CoH2 in the works. It's pretty well established that Paragon tried to get a CoH2 off the ground several times and NCSoft wasn't interested.

Not being on a side doesn't equate to neutrality.

To elaborate - I'm against people making stuff up and calling it truth. I'm against people playing telephone and getting the message wrong. 90% of which is coming from saveCoH. If you've actually been following along, I've called out people who you would consider 'anti-save CoH' when they were wrong too.

Liar liar, Nemesis on fire!

I have no side.

Or perhaps "realignment of company focus (into markets and products that are succeeding)."

Parsing PR-speak is a rathole. That way lies madness.

Actually, the closure is a pretty damning indictment of the first part. While not unheard of, it's rare for a company to kill a truly healthy product.

More elevating discourse. Your high-ground is sinking.

There's a lot of that going around. It's basically a stalling tactic - try to make your opponent waste time using search.

No, but he saw Gangnam Style on You-tube.

Except your typical vigilante heroes break laws for important things like saving lives. Not for a video game.

I think they are DLC - but they are also still advertised - which addresses a different complaint many have about NCSoft's support of CoH.

*can* be terminated.

This is, of course, contradicted by the plans to "release the code into the wild" if a C&D comes down.

Actually, I think the real reason that EQ1 continues to soldier on is that they manage to sell an expansion a year (or more).

All hindsight, of course, but you have to wonder what would have happened if CoH had been doing an expansion a year instead of putting everything in free Issues...

So any creator who's not actively selling their work has no complaint if it gets posted on the internet?

That's absurd.

That assumes that NCSoft doesn't respond to the decreased workload by decreasing staff. And support costs for MMOs tend to be quite high.

It's not like he was making up numbers, he was just reporting the results of an annual survey run by Game Developer magazine.

In both cases, they're self reported numbers, I see no reason why PayScale.com would be more credible. In any event, there's not a huge difference, considering that the survey reported an average salary of $70k for a game designer, not that far off from the $66k you posted.

It's still well over the $50k average you'd need to justify costing Paragon out at $75k a head.

I'm talking GM support, billing support, etc... none of which were covered by Paragon, but were nevertheless part of the cost of doing business for CoH.

Regarding salaries, you might take a look at this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...ey_Results.php

It's from 2010, but given the economic climate, I doubt it's moved much (in either direction) since then. And I don't think that SF/SV would be cheaper than these averages (in fact I think it would be higher, but we don't need to go there.)

The average salaries start at $50k for QA, which would correlate to $75k once you count benefits and overhead. Other disciplines are higher, often significantly so.

So I still think your estimates are too low.

Actually, that's an absurdly low number. That's less than a fresh out of school CS grad would get in Silicon Valley. I know someone who recently signed on at Zynga (senior coder, 20+ years experience). His all-in number (including benefits and stock) is about 280k.

Now that's just coders. QA, art types would be much less. But still, 75k including benefits... not making sense.

Remember, rule of thumb on overhead is roughly 50%. So if the average with benefits is 75k, that would make the actual salary roughly 50k. You'll have a tough time getting quality people at that kind of money.

But even accepting those numbers, you still haven't accounted for servers and support, which could easily cost more than 2 million a year.

Actually, the 'legal complications' argument makes some sense. If they transfered CoH to someone else as a running entity, they'd have to transfer over account information, balances, points, character data, etc... All of that (and all of the accompanying contractual foo) is quite possibly not worth the headache for the relatively small amount of money beind discussed.

If they let the game close, they can theoretically transfer the code 'clean' without any of those annoying encumbrances.

This could mean that none of the character/account data will transfer though.

The only problem with the hypothesis is that you'd still want to let people know that this was going to happen though, otherwise the bulk of your potential customers will move on before you can get a new service started up.

So believe him if you want. Just don't complain if it turns out to be that he's trolling you while rolling around in his underwear.

Actually 'only' 48.5 billion.