NCSoft and Massively

While we may never know who was really responsible for choking CoH development during the Gang of 15 time, there is this point to consider:

When NCSoft bought out the IP, every single Dev still working on CoH plus a few more who had been moved off of CoH to other Cryptic projects jumped the Cryptic ship to be part of the NCSoft family.

Now, it would seem rather odd that if NCSoft had been the bad guy and was the one strangling CoH development that so many Devs would have so readily signed up with the company that had been strangling CoH.

And if NCSoft really was the culprit for CoH cutbacks, then what does that say about life at Cryptic that almost 20 Devs would rather work for the strangler than stay at Cryptic?

Jus' sayin'.

Zombie hit the big point.....

...dun dun DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!

Personally, I took Mod 8's comment as part opinion, part subtle hint to drop the blame game, because it both treads dangerous waters and is kind of unproductive since we don't really know.

From where I stand, I don't think it really matters WHO it was that downsized the CoH development team, merely that it happened and that, in view of the buyout and reinvestment, it was a mistake. There are only two ways this can go - either the downsize was a mistake and the buyout and reinvestment were the solution to fix this mistake, or the downsize WASN'T a mistake, which would make the buyout and reinvestment highly unreasonable, and I don't believe people would invest that kind of money without a solid reason.

If we can agree that the downsize was the mistake and the reinvestment the fix, then it only stands to reason that the folks in charge would not want to repeat the same mistake. I like to think there's a reason NCsoft reinvested in City of Heroes, and if we accept that, then it makes no sense for them to sink their own investment on a whim. No reason to repeat old mistakes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Jack's games also have a history of "reverse feature-creep": Buys IP from original developers and announced they'll release all the features promised!

But cooperative PC crewing will be too complicated

Internal areas of your craft will need to be instanced and limited to combat scenarios

Clan built and owned resource-gathering and social hubs are not possible at this time

and on and on and on...

Jack's game seems to get smaller in every press release

I'm in agreement with Arcanaville on this. In the course of game development, it's fairly normal for a team to be downsized once the game is launched. In the case of CoH, that was extended for the first several months because of 40-50 being in the pipeline, and then CoV. However as it became to be know when the original Lord Recluse (Zeb Cook) left, basically his contract was up. Big dev teams are hired to build and launch games, not stay forever and ever. So while the reduction to the 15 was extreme, it doesn't have to "mean" anything.

Same goes with the buyout. Cryptic and NC had a contract as Publisher/Developer, and eventually time came to renegotiate that. They could have kept going, they could have killed the game, they could have done what they did. I'm sure it was a long involved process that led them to the conclusion that buying out the team and property was the way to go that helped all parties. No need for there to be a badguy.

However NCSoft's desire to keep things going in this game, as opposed to cutting and running when it came to games like TR and AA, says a lot about their confidence in the property and the team. Investment for a company that takes it seriously means just that, they want to increase the strength of the bonds, and have a very strong interest in future success. While some decisions may seem fickle to players, they're really decisions made with a lot of consideration. Concluding they have a hard and fast "trigger option" that says we're bailing on this game if your expansion doesn't meet these goals, is a pretty ridiculous conclusion when all that is taken into account.

I find it puzzling that no one has pointed out in this thread the fact that CoH's revenues have consistently exceeded those of the Guild Wars franchise now for at least a full year, and likely longer (I don't feel like looking that far back in NC's quarterlies), yet as far as I can tell there is no buzz/rumor/what have you on the net that the plug might get pulled on GW.

And I would suspect that despite its lack of a subscription fee, it does not cost substantially less money to operate the server architecture, GM/support staff, and so forth for Guild Wars than it does for us.

Either way, CoH has pulled in $16.5 million in the last 9 months (in revenue) and manages to be about 5% of NC's total global revenues despite having zero presence in NC's biggest regional market (Korea). The percentage has slid lately mostly only because of Aion's unprecedented success (it's overtaken both Lineage titles combined by a large margin, as of Q3 2009, and now accounts for just slightly upwards of half of NCsoft's global revenue.) Aion's also given the American and European branches of NCsoft a massive kick in the pants, at least as concerns their relative contribution to the global revenues - sales from Korea are down from 57% of total sales in Q2 2009 to 48% of total sales in Q3 2009, despite the actual gross revenue rising from 79,199 million won to 79,922 million won. NCsoft saw a 127% increase in revenues from North America, and a 301% increase in revenues from Europe, from Q2 to Q3 of this year, which is pretty much entirely attributable to Aion.

I do think it's a fair point that the long-term "Champions effect" remains to be seen - after all, CoH revenues were noticeably, if not alarmingly, down this quarter, the first in which Champions had a meaningful market presence. The slide looks worse if you compare it to Q2 2009, but relative to this time this year, CoH revenues are only down about 12%... which I'd say is pretty good for a nearly six year old game that just had a very shiny competitor hit the market.

As someone said above, not every game can be WoW, and expecting every game to be WoW is silly.

EDIT: On a little further thought, one thing that _wouldn't_ surprise me is NCsoft taking the last step along the path they've been treading for a while, and merging the EU CoH population into the US servers. But I think the US servers are fairly safe.

Sales are down after the a year's worth of the biggest recession since the Great Depression and unemployment is at it highest in 30 years?

Surprising!

Slashman: I couldn't agree more, honestly - the greatest portion of the drop in players and the latter half of the Cryptic days were more or less concurrent, with the slide slowing (but not stopping) when NCsoft bought out the City-of franchise. My personal belief is that this is most attributable to the devs' lack of attention to how poorly (or in some cases, not at all) some of CoV's flagship features were working, most glaringly base raids and the Cathedral of Pain. The fact that features advertised on CoV's box are still not working, three years later, can't help the game's press much. I cannot help but say, however, that I think there *are* more important things for the dev team to be working on than base raids and the Cathedral of Pain - but this is only the case because, to be blunt, most of the "hardcore" PvP crowd to which such content caters has moved on to other games by now and likely won't be back. I'd love to see the Cathedral of Pain go in, but at this point, it would honestly best be implemented as a solely PvE affair with no connection to bases or base raiding, I think.

Like it or not, PvP was a signfiicant fueler of CoV's sales, in my opinion, and the relative failure of it was central to CoV's underperformance. The general long-term neglect of redside is probably at least peripheral to this - while CoV's content is on average far more interesting and better written (technically speaking) than CoH's, there's also a lot less variety of it - you're likely to have seen every red-exclusive story arc in the game by the time you've leveled three villains to 50, if not two. (Assuming you're trying, and complaints about the substance of the content wherein you're for the most part Arachnos' dog rather than feeling proactive aside.)

CoH has declined significantly less than its peers (ignoring WoW, which is its own little beast) in the 5-1/2 years since its release; even at a conservative estimate of the subscription count we're at 55% or so of the initial launch total, which is better than AoC or WAR despite those games being only a year or two old. I can't really explain why WoW is so successful other than name recognition and inertia; the quality of the game has been slipping for quite some time, and recently that slide has been accelerating.

Zombie: More surprising is that despite said recession AND a competing product, they're only down 12% from last year.

Arcana: You're almost certainly right here (as per usual). CO's initial performance seems pretty lackluster, though I lack any actual numbers relating to it. I won't be surprised if it's "maintenance moded" pretty quickly though.

For what it's worth, I'm really looking forward to Going Rogue. My interest in CoH has significantly waned over the years, though this is due to me burning out on MMOs in general rather than any intrinsic qualities of the game - as it is now, it's an interesting diversion for me maybe once a week rather than something I play regularly. The only times I play CoH "seriously" anymore are 2X weekends, for the most part - hopefully GR will get me to at least play a bit more than a few hours a week again.