LittleDavid

Drat! There goes my plans to make a Cyborg Super Booster character wearing a trenchcoat and fedora named N1PPL3S who shouts "MY NIPPLES EXPLODE WITH DELIGHT!" as his Self-Dectruction battlecry ...

*ducks random Propelled objects*

Truth, right here. Angry_Citizen, if you're going to throw a temper tantrum about CNN allowing coverage of gaming issues, and if you seriously think that's somehow taking away from coverage on African warlords, you should be complaining to CNN. The community's efforts to get coverage of City of Heroes on CNN, as CNN has done with World of Warcraft, is not a sign that the community needs to "grow up."

Would Black Mesa Source be relevant to your interests?

(Yes, they're finally getting somewhere with it.)

I gave it my "this belongs on CNN" green light! Is there a chance this could end up on CNN proper?

From what Richard Garriott said in an interview with Eurogamer around Christmas last year, this situation happened in reverse during Tabula Rasa's development.

At first, Destination Games wanted to make a game that would appeal to the Korean and greater Asian market. So for the first two years, they worked on an iteration of Tabula Rasa that looked like this and played like this. However, the feedback they were getting from Korean playtesters indicated it wasn't working; the Asian-inspired design of the first Tabula Rasa came off as foreigners trying to imitate Asian culture.

So this first version of Tabula Rasa was scrapped, and they decided to go with a design that was better suited to the studio employees' strengths. That's how we got the Tabula Rasa we have now--er, had.

Now, me, personally ... I would have pushed for both versions of TR to have been published. Maybe the first version could have been a distant prequel reworked into the storyline of the second game, like select humans from the 1800s taken by the Eloh to help fight the Bane on distant planets or something. Who knows, Tabula Rasa v1 could have brought in enough money to offset the delay and costs incurred developing Tabula Rasa v2. Now that I know more about this "all-or-nothing" strategy employed by the big companies, though, I don't think NCSoft would have ever considered it ...

Huh ... We're talking about the game by Smith & Tinker that was going to be Mechwarrior 5, right? The one with the trailer of that mech pilot in his cockpit, deploying UAVs and fightiong a Marauder and an Atlas?

MMOs can be more than RPGs like City of Heroes or World of Warcraft; what matters is that the game has a elements of a persistent world (even if most of the game is instanced) and somewhere in-game where you can meet up with more than just a few players.

So, Square's Front Mission Online, which I think took place during one of the wars on Huffman Island, was an MMO PVP Mech Simulator ... and I wish I could have played that one, but they never released it outside of Japan and shut it down a year or two before I found out about it. ;_;

I'm definitely glad that the option to ignore publishers is becoming feasible, now that we have crowdfunding systems and digital distribution platforms like Steam. If an indie developer can successfully take advantage of both, then they can completely avoid having to sell themselves to publishers and investors.

By the way, American_Knight, this is the other half of my rationale behind what I said, concerning CoH-vintage MMOs operating under smaller and/or independent studios.

The way I'm seeing it, those smaller and independent studios aren't as focused on maximizing profits like a big publishing company such as Electronics Arts is, and it's probably because they are small and independent that they can get away with it. Big businesses have a lot of stakeholders who want to see ever-increasing profits, so there is a lot of outside pressure to make as much money as possible.

I'm willing to bet that at least some of those studios running CoH-vintage MMOs aren't publicly traded, either--which would keep other companies from either performing a hostile takeover through a tender offer to shareholders, or from buying enough stock to be on the board of directors and putting pressure on the studio to change its plans.

In either of those cases, I think a studio independently running an MMO only has to worry about getting enough revenue to continue operating the game. If they see an opportunity where they could shut the MMO down to invest their funds into something that would (or does) bring much more profit, that's ultimately their decision--they don't have to worry about pleasing shareholders or getting the ax from upper-level management due to not being beneficial enough compared to the duds and blockbusters.

In other words, those studios are free to "do it for the art," or as a labor of love.

It's because I'm comparing his example to what was said of Electronic Arts' strategy in Escapist Magazine--that duds are used as tax write-offs, and are therefore more valuable to the company than a game that makes a modest proift, but isn't a blockbuster. Did you read my opening post?

I'm gonna need some more coffee tonight.

This definitely isn't a business practice I was are of until now. I suspect that's the same for a lot of the people claiming CoH was operating at a loss because NCSoft shut it down.

Though from this context, it definitely explains why MMOs of CoH's vintage (or older) are still operating just fine with smaller and/or independent studios. Or why Cyan Worlds has been able to keep bringing Myst Online Uru Live back from the dead ...

Okay, I was wrong there, and should have said that during its first few years City of Heroes brought in an amount comparable to Aion's current revenue.

That doesn't invalidate the point I was trying to make, though, in that City of Heroes used to be way more profitable in its first few years, and that the mentality Electronic Arts has might be also present in NCSoft--that they would kill an otherwise healthy MMO just because it can't be used as a tax writeoff like a dud, nor bring in a massive amount of revenue like a blockbuster.

Are you counting the huge spike from the sale of City of Villains, though?

Emphasis mine.

Doesn't this sound a bit like the present situation with City of Heroes and Paragon Studios? I know it wasn't always like this; City of Heroes in its first few years of life made as much as Aion or Guild Wars 2 do now. However, we know that up until this month, City of Heroes was bringing in several million bucks. Call me naive, but I find it hard to see how all the expenses of continued maintenance and development of the game could exceed that kind of revenue. I wonder if this might be the more likely explanation for NCSoft's "realignment of focus."

If nothing else, I think it's food for thought for the smug detractors responding to articles on "Save Paragon City!" insisting that the only logical explanation for NCSoft's actions was that the game was operating at a loss and therefore should be left to die.

same here. It'd be nice if we could see it again for one last hurrah.

As someone I know said when he saw some of the comments in the Kotaku article, "there'll always be a peanut gallery."

It kind of reminds me of when Jason Scott blogged about the sudden closure of AOL Hometown. Although he got a lot of positive feedback, some of the responses were negative, smug, and unhelpful which he categorized in a follow-on post. I think we're looking at a similar situation here, just in a different context. Or to put it like Jason Scott did, the non-positive responses can be lumped into the following general headings:

• Allow me to explain why I play a different title/don't play MMOs. I am awesome.
• If The Game Is Free, No Compassion For Thee
• City of Heroes is unprofitable and deserves to be shut down, based on a number of criteria that I mostly made up
• I sure do hates me some CoH and the People Who Play It
• Watch as if by magic I say something indicating that not only did I fail to read the details or consider what's going, I apparently didn’t even read the article I'm commenting on or, possibly, my screen.

You'd think an event like this would cause people to think, "if it could happen to CoH, it can happen to my game" and consider the consequences of investing so much of their life into it. Just because something's old and doesn't have state-of-the-art graphics doesn't mean it deserves to be thrown away like tissue paper. That so many sites dedicated to retro gaming exist, and that so many older video games are constantly being 'ported to new consoles or featured on digital distribution services, stands as a testament.