Starsman

The rumor only accounts for the game engine. The IP is, from what I understand, now property of NCSoft.

That one took me almost a year to get through, and yea that sort of was the only way I managed to convince Castle to get the penalty off Unyielding, via a compromise that resulted in the strongest possible invuln weaker, not stronger.

I seen worse things slip into contracts, but mainly indirect cost increases (we recently got @#$%! by RIM and forced to upgrade phones out of pocket effectively nearly tripling the year phone maintenance budget.)

Not sure where things can sneak through here, but without access to the contract itself, it's hard to entirely dismiss this theory, especially since it's the only thing so far that seems to make any sense at all (unless the game suddenly took a horrible dive since last quarter's reports.)

Such "perpetual right to renew" can "easily" be worked around by demanding more money than you know your licensee will ever be able to afford, though. We saw that recently happen to Direct TV with Viacom. The 5 year thing may be too big for what I have seen (personally, outside government contracts all government contracts I seen have a 5 year window) but the negotiation may just have gone too expensive this one time around.

War Mace revamp.

Dominator Attack Set revamp (the snipe increase to 20s and 3.56 ds was not my idea but almost everything else was in my list.)

Invulnerability losing it's Unyielding self -Def at the expense of minimally reducing the +def in Invincibility

Taunt inflicting -Range as a way to manipulate critters in getting closer to you.

Now will never see the light of day, but Bio's adaptation procs (heal on defense, end on efficiency, toxic damage on offensive.)

Thats all I can think off the top of my head.

I also stole Arcanavilles idea for endurance free Brawl, told the idea to Castle and credited Arcanaville for it, of course. He added it the same day, Arcanaville was shocked on the quick introduction of that into the patch notes.

That can legally happen, but its unlikely. Would you do such a deal with some one that cheated you out of a business?

As a player, would you not feel dirty if you started giving money to the company that did this to the current development team?

As an employee, would you feel encouraged to work for a company that did this to you only to offer you another job at whatever compensation they saw now fit?

It does not mater how much Aion cost to do anymore. If it had losses, that went into another tax year books and got written off as such.

Today Aion is making lots of money, very likely more than it spends or requires to be sustained. That's all that matters.

My guess is that Paragon Studios had to keep afloat on it's own devices and, like most companies, worked on a near-zero balance budget (not an accountant sorry for bad terminology) where you spend nearly all money you make. This would mean that CoH was financing that other project.

If CoH is forced to stop earning any profits, then they have to fire everyone at by end of the accounting month.

That's not reason to kill the game so suddenly. If the game was in the negative, perhaps. But the game was, for all I understand, profitable. Not a huge money maker, but still profitable. Basically: it was in a position where should they want to switch strategies, you slowly move the team to other projects and slow down development.

Killing the game the way they did just does not click unless some legal or accounting hurdle forced their hand.

At first I thought it was accounting, now I'm starting to think it's indeed was negotiations going sour.

That does not make sense. It's not even the same demographic (heroes and fantasy)

Licensing agreements always have re-negotiating points. They may not be exactly 5 years, it can easily be once a year and still be a possibility. The switch to Freedom may as well be the reason for a change of hearts in the negotiation too, since now the game would be entirely in direct competition with free-to-play champions.

As I mentioned, if true, the licensing deals can go south at the last minute easily, especially if the owning party had no actual interest in enabling the competition to exist.

Also, it's not about the IP, I think they actually purchased the IP. NCSoft can take all the characters, power data, content, everything, and create it's own new client and server and keep rolling City of Heroes. Problem is: thats the hardest part to change. Would had been easy to change the name and sugar coat.

If there is truth to the rumor, it's very likely this was going negotiation that fell through at the last minute, not too unlike that Direct TV/ Warner Brother's fiasco recently.

However in this case, it was not just about a few stations but about killing the oxygen supply on the studio.

There is a potential chance the team was aware this negotiation was going on, but they likely kept being told "don't worry, we will handle it". Again, if true, it's very likely Atary/Cryptic made the negotiation look reasonable all the time, while every day inching things away so it always was out of reach, so they could never be blamed of directly killing the game.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If this is true, then you are extremely wrong, you just happened to accidentally point in the right direction.

I followed up with the following bit:

That rumor makes a LOT of sense... I am aware at least of part of it but not about the span of the lease or a possible refusal to renew.... where did you read it? Not sure why it would be a reason to fire the entire staff overnight... although the licensing may had also been the force to kill all income generated by the game... "we allow you a 2 month transition window but no income can be generated during that window" would be enough to force a studio shutdown...

If this is true... the NCSoft hate may be entirely out of place... and moving on to Champions Online may be precisely what they want to come out of this.

It makes a lot of sense... I was aware of the licensing and knew it would get in the way of any open-sourcing or re-sale of the game... but should it be true that Cryptic was the one behind the killing.... it would make sense... and it would drive me crazy insane....

So is Shadowbane.

I gave this same thing a LOT of thought in my drive from work. The game was designed for dialup so it's likely the client-communication is not insanely complex.

If I was 5 years younger, single and with less responsibilities in my life, I would spend the next 2 months making sure I got an emulated server working.

Well now there is a shocker...

Hawk was yesterday doing last minute changes to powers and talking about it in beta. They had no clue.

I don't have the money to make an MMO, but I may be able to slowly build some small scale multiplayer game with player-created content and user hosted servers (the Minecraft way.)

Any such large project will take more than a year, though. In the meantime I may first make sure I can make some small casual games to make sure I am ready to make "real" games.

Already have one on the Android Google Play store: Misu Misu Kaboom, a cat that spits bombs out of it's mouth.