Gangrel_EU

I never expect an MMO to hit "WoW" numbers again... at least not as subscription only.

However, in my view, it is definitely low for an existing MMO with a dedicated player-base. The wonderful part of City of X, is indeed it's *dedicated* playerbase... however, that would slowly over time loose players, until it got to a point of unprofitably. Great retention ratio for the game... *once* you get players here. I am sure that we have *all* brought friends to the game, who then left the game for one reason or another... people who pop back and forth with subscriptions every so often (I am one of those people).

However, I do feel that a distinct lack of stuff to do once you hit the cap (apart from badges) was a turn off for players. I know several people who left the game because there was nothing else to do apart from "roll an alt". Not even a "carrot on a stick goose chase". Different things for different peoples to be honest.

Would it have made some kind of sense to consolidate a number of servers in the end to at least make the game appear "fuller" than it actually was? Yes... if they had a method of resolving name/SG clashes *sensibly* (this part to be honest is essential as a lot of character names are a focal part of the character).

*shrugs*

To be honest, I thought that Freedom would have brought in more money than it did. At least it slowed the decline whilst Freedom was running. If it wasn't for Freedom, I am actually *heavily* inclined to believe that City of Heroes/Paragon Studio's would have been shuttered a while ago.

Sales figures is a catch all term for all monies that is earnt by that title, either by subscriptions, microtransactions, box sales or account services.

Earnings suggest around 50-60K subscribers (that is breaking total earnings into $15/month subscriptions)

Correction: A *temporary* suspension of sales from the website (which btw SW:TOR also did). Will it hit their *potential* sales... yes.

But it isn't stopping people from going out to purchase the game physically and using the code from that.

Although, to be honest, once again, this just goes to show that with the utmost testing of a product, something *always* exceeds your expectations (unless you are the military, where a missing semi- colon produces interesting results in testing)

Chances are they will actually refund you from the start of September.

Actually, my Gangrel tattoo is on my left arm....

Although close enough (my global got changed but i never altered it in my sig...)

because it is the wonderful world of percentages...

To be fair, it depends on which point of view you want to take.

Q2 2012

City of Heros Earning: 2855million Won
Aion Earning: 36367million Won

City of Heroes earnt ((2855/36367)*100) = 7.85% of what Aion did
Aion earnt ((36367/2855)*100) = 1273% of what City of Heroes did

His figure probably comes out from the quick back of the napkin calculations with rounding up and down accordingly for the initial figures.

836037 million Won (roughly $737million) *total* money coming in from Aion since its launch. No costs factored into it.

If it did, then it would dwarf even SWTOR in terms of costs (or the Tabula Rasa debacle of multiple remakes etc etc)

Considering that since the launch of Aion, it has raked in *around* $700million since launch... i would say that it has quite safely paid back its investment. Blade & Soul, no idea... its figures are not on the Quarterly reports yet... wait for Q3 of NCsoft financials for those ones.

Unfortunately, the last i heard about that one, it was going to be come a single player game... due to financial problems with the developer/publisher IIRC

Never got into Spore... although EA were responsible for the closure of Bullfrog (eventually). But this was back in 1995 when EA got a stake in the studio. Last game from them was 2001, although it took until 2004 for the studio to be closed *properly*

From previous experience of MMO closure from NCsoft... refunds on subscriptions are pro-rata'd from the announcement date back to the card that did the payment.

Points... not sure on this one.

They *have* done "gift" packages (normally an account for one of their other MMO's) which is *above and beyond* what they are legally entitled to do.

Tabula Rasa had *no* official forums. They had beta forums which closed a few days before the official headstart of the game.

The 2 main TR forums were PlanetTR (now shuttered), and the "Unofficial TR" forums (which i started, ran, and still keep up although in a non skinned version).

Their quarterly reports put the *revenue* further down though... around $800K/month... which equates to 55,000 (ish) players (at $15/month).

With Free2Play though, it does get harder to gauge though how many active players there are though without official numbers being released.

Personally, i hope that everyone is VIP... cos it will *suck* otherwise... and as all subscriptions have been cancelled, monthly subbers will drop down to premium status anyway locking them out of most of their characters. Personally, I would just make everything free on the market and make everyone a VIP subscriber.

Going from *previous* experience, all monies owed for subscriptions not playable will get refunded (for those multimonth subbers). There will still *probably* be a token gesture on top of this (I know from the closure of TR I was awarded CoX/Lineage 2 and IIRC Aion account generation codes. Still had to subscribe to them though afterwards.

Again, going from previous experience with the closure of Tabula Rasa, the staff did still have access to their ingame accounts to run the event. How many developers will stay on is another matter, some might get *some* pay, others will do it out of the goodness of their heart to help code/run the event. This is generally a very hard time, scrabbling looking for a job, whilst also trying to help keep the closure of a game running smoothly.

To be honest, if you are going this far... do it for *all* MMO's... because eventually they will close down for whatever reason.

Both Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault just had *pure* lack of numbers as the main reason for closure. Dungeon Runners was iffy in numbers and had been gutted staff wise before the announcement. Exteel, no idea as to why

Although around the time of the Tabula Rasa closure announcement, it was also the *huge* NCsoft West rearrangement with management (and possibly dirty tricks to get the Garriotts out of NCsoft West)... unfortunately, this also led to to the gutting of the Brighton office, with pretty much all the community staff having to shift over to the US if they wanted to keep their jobs.... Avatea and SnowStorm (Guild Wars) moved to be employed directly by the *studio* whose game they were working on (so Avatea moved to Paragon Studios, SnowStorm moved to Arena.net

Rockjaw, Spaff and Aero (Creative Concepts team) all ended up leaving the company... Aero is the only one that i know of who isnt still in the Games Industry (along with Avatea who is now in China, status unknown).

Kerensky and GhostRaptor were also let go at the same time. All of these people were community staffers for City Of X (EU) at one point or another.

Tera was started by a group who left Lineage 3, and not Blade and Soul (some stolen art assests etc etc from Lineage 3 was used in the initial Tera forming stages).

I would imagine that Paragon Studios was being reliant upon the revenue stream from City of Heroes to stay afloat. And developing an MMO isnt cheap, so whilst they may have had to take a loan from NCsoft initially, with no further income coming in, it might have been heavy to fully develop 3 mmos at the same time (Blade and SOul, Wildstar (which has been going on for YEARS!) and Paragon Studio's 2nd MMO).

So the decision to cut the "least developed" one would actually make sense... which unfortunately would leave Paragon Studio's doing nothing...

Planetside is actually SOE....

To be honest, considering that *non* MMO publishers shut down studios in a similar fashion, get out of playing computer games full stop...

Yes, i am still bitter over the closure of Bullfrog.

Oh agreed the 2nd part is abrupt (about the forum access)... but I believe that this is where the wrangling to properly shut down the game kicks in... argue for your place to stay on, and how many developers will work for peanuts to keep it running etc etc

I know that for the Tabula Rasa closing event, some of the ex developers came in to help run (and code) the final event for *free*.

Yes, TR didnt have official forums, but that was before the whole restructure of NCsoft West so that it was the studio who was responsible for community stuff, and not NCsoft (and the decision was made before launch that there would be no official forums along similar lines to Guild Wars)

And yes, TR was mid development cycle (player controlled tanks being one), Earth zones being coded etc etc when the announcement came out (You have to remember that TR was young, so it wasnt hitting "expansion stage"...

Pretty much whenever you cancel an MMO, it will *always* be mid development... normally with the next 2 or 3 parts being simultaneously developed.