Life Time Subscription

The reason the CoH2 turnaround could be a decent time to offer Lifer subscriptions to city is simple.

There are two ways to handle the creation of CoH2. Either A) The Devs from CoH are pulled off their regularly scheduled work (bugchecking, content creation, etc) to instead work on CoH2 -OR- a new crew or simply larger crew will be hired on to do so while the Devs we have now continue working on CoH1.

I suppose, in truth, you'd likely as not combine the two or simply hire a full second team, as the current Devs are content generators, not engine builders. And trust me, those are two -incredibly- different tasks.

Now. You've suddenly got a massive work force to pay, one way or the other. Loans are taken out against the company's credit or offered by NCSoft's budgeting committee on the creation of a new game (CoH2). This money is expected to be returned at some point, usually with interest. Unless, of course, CoH starts bringing in a playerbase massive enough that the extra money brought in could pay another 15-20 people's 80k+/year salaries.

Typically when a game ships you see a price tag of around $45-60 for a standard console game or a one-off computer game. This could be anything from Half-Life to Dragon Age to a Barbie's Magical Pink Racing Horse game. This inflated cost is to make up for the Development time. And a company needs to ship and sell tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies to pay off their debts to banks or investors and make a reasonable profit. The same goes for an MMO Title.

However an MMO title rarely goes on the shelves for $60, does it? I mean sure you've got your multiple-expansion boxes being sold 3 months after the last one ships on WoW with a Prima Strategy Guide. But that's about it. usually they're on the shelves for about $30 and include a free first month of game-time with the box. so you're actually paying about $15 for the box in CoH's case since a monthly sub is $14.99.

So they're not making all their money back on that initial get, are they? Nope. They need to sell twice as many copies as that $60 game up there, or stay online with the same number of players for 4 months (at $15 a month) just to pay off their debts and make a "Reasonable" profit.

Now when CoH2 comes out will NCNC and Paragon Studios keep the full development team for it or, more likely, will we see the same size of skeleton crew we had earlier in the life-cycle of the game? Since it's an older game we'll likely as not see the Dev team shrink a bit as more Devs are swapped over to CoH2 to be the Content Developers there. Does this mean CoH will be completely shut down?

Well the answer to that is: Maybe.

If CoH is deemed, after the release of CoH2, still profitable, then you'll likely as not see further content generation and, at the least, the maintenance of the server farm. If it is not deemed to be profitable NCNC and Paragon will likely cut back on employees until it -is- profitable.

Now. NCNC and Paragon might also choose to offer Lifetime Subs for CoH1 in order to pay off their backers for the Development of CoH2. And at $200-$500-$1000 (who honestly knows how much they'd charge?) they'd pay it off fairly quickly in relation to a standard MMO payoff of a game. So it wouldn't be a -bad- business decision, as they'd have a great deal of turnover from one playerbase to the next (CoH players becoming CoH2 players) and I think it's safe to say that comparatively few players would maintain open accounts in both games.

So yes. With CoH2 on the horizon offering Lifetime Subs to CoH1 might not be a -terrible- idea, so long as the company does it within 2-3 month of launch (likely after seeing how bad CoH2 hit their CoH1 population) Why would it be good to continue offering CoH1? Because CoH2 will, almost undoubtedly, be offered on Windows 7 as it's platform. XP is obsolete, Vista was terrible and should be forgotten, but 7 is the new standard. CoH2, I'm sad to say, may bot even be -playable- on a Vista or XP computer. That's not even getting into the graphical updates and other system requirements.

"So what?" you ask. "why does it matter if you can't use XP on CoH2? I have windows 7!" Yes. You do. I don't. Well, i -do- but I haven't bothered to install it on the hunk of junk tower I'm using. A lot of people don't have high-end computers. in fact it's fairly safe to say most people who have computers don't even have "Gaming rigs". So killing CoH in favor of CoH2 utterly would be a poor business decision so long as the various XP and Vista users were still willing to pay $15 a month for a subscription. Well... At least enough that they're making a profit for keeping the server farms running.

Add the tantalizing Lifetime subscription bump paying off Paragon's debts incurred by developing CoH2 and instead causing them to turn an early profit. now you've got a winning equation.

So in that situation, if in no other, short term profit on an "Obsolete" engine and game would hasten the long-term profit of a "New and Improved!" engine and game.

-Rachel-

Nothing, Yet. Though it's not inconceivable, as Asheron's Call and Everquest both prove.

Once the game's engine and content have been pushed to their extremes you have two choices: Fake it or Make it.

Faking it is never again advancing what the engine can do and instead focusing entirely on new content (new missions, new zones, more costume pieces and emotes, new powersets without any further graphical or engine enhancements)

Making it is either Modification of the engine (which can destroy a game in soooo many different ways after a certain point) or creating a new engine (and thus a new game) which has all the capabilities of the game you've got -and- new ones (wall crawling, anyone?)

Personally I'd prefer to see CoH1 get a new engine compatible with all the old data, I really would! An engine in which physics are a consideration from the get-go (getting hit by or riding on cars, boats, or blimps for example) buildings are considered "Walkable" objects with specific powers toggled on. Rope-swinging as a travel power is a viable option based on an "Above Ground" mesh which allows the rope multiple target locations. Running on Water. And many more abilities.

But the development time needed to create that engine would, likely as not, be better spent on a new title or a new version of an old title (CoH2)

-Rachel-

Guild Wars 2 is also currently in development (of course, GW's payment model doesn't really lend itself to this discussion, since every GW account is a "lifetime subscription")

I heard that GW2 will allow GW players to carry their existing characters over if they want to play GW2. That could just be a rumor tho.

I've seen too much screaming over players feeling their money for one title is being used to support another (ChampO to STO is a recent example, but it happened with DAOC and WAR as well as EQ to EQ2) to believe that players will see it a good deal to buy a lifetime sub to a title that isn't going to be the primary focus of the studio any longer.

I also disagree that CoH2 will be Windows 7 exclusive - doing so would shrink the potential player base incredibly. In order to attract players MMOs need to be able to cast their net as widely as possible - this is one of the reasons why WoW is so successful: low system specs means it can be played on pretty much any internet-capable PC.

Also, I believe that most AAA MMOs hit the shelf at full price; it's only after the box has been on the shelf for a while will discounting the box cost be considered. Plus they'll also launch with Collectors' Editions, which actually cost more than the standard box.

I get that Paragon Studios might offer a CoH/V lifetime sub to keep CoH/V with a player population, from the player perspective its a lousy deal.

Oh, as for starting CoH 2: first off, some key people off the CoH/V live team would step back from CoH/V in order to work on "other initiatives" and a lot of new faces would appear on the live team. Hmm, why does that seem familiar? ;-)

Well geeze. Y'know. You're right! they shouldn't make a new engine for Windows 7 and make all the Vista (who got free vista upgrades) and XP users SoL. After all; You can play CoH on windows 3.1, right..?

As computer code and information becomes more and more complex so, too, does the method in which it is translated by various components. This is why there are graphics cards, sound cards, and other riser boards with minimum system requirements. In order for the game to progress, graphically and in it's ability to handle more situations, the hardware and firmware supporting it must also progress. This is why the nVidia Geforce 7900 video card isn't still the end-all and be-all of graphics cards.

At some point you have to sacrifice the size of your targeted playerbase in exchange for the flexibility of the software. By making it a Windows 7 game rather than Windows XP any user with Windows 7 can play, right? Well an XP compatible computer can be upgraded to 7, in many cases. So by making the base of their game in 7 they offer full graphical card range. From the highest end equipment to the lowest end that Windows 7 supports. Which is a wider range considering that future graphics cards will likely also require Windows 7 base.

-Rachel-

Doing just a teensy bit of research I found that there are people using a GeForce 5200 on Windows 7's Aero interface. And remember XYZ0 Model, Quality, Revision 0. High First number, high Second Number, 0 for third and fourth is always better. So by using Windows 7 the Dev team would likely temporarily lose a portion of the playerbase on the upgrade to CoH 2. But those players would probably still play CoH1 until they could put together $100 for a Windows 7 disk, wouldn't they? Think like the business, not like the player.

Windows 98, actually, yes.

However, with the large Windows XP installed base, they'd likely write for that as a minimum if this theoretical COH2 were coming out soonish (a year.) There's little to nothing in Vista or 7 *exclusively* to write to. At worst, I'd say - assuming they started development on it *today,* planned release in 2-3 years - THEN they take Vista and Directx 10 as a minimum, as that's the only thing Vista/7 support that XP does not. (Simplifying matters a bit there, there ARE other things, and they'd likely take hardware support in various OSes into consideration. After all, eventually there's not going to *be* a new driver release for XP from the big manufacturers.)

Look at PC sales of Halo 2... can't remember seeing it in stores long, even though the Halo series is popular on XBox? Know what one of the big issues with it (and IIRC Shadowrun) were? They required - artificially - Vista. They locked out Windows XP. And subsequentially tanked. Some people did actually hack it a bit and run it on XP - and found it ran perfectly fine.

Regardless, making it "7 only" would be artificial, as the underpinnings are further development from Vista. So your base, there, would be Windows Vista.

Edit:
See comment above about PC sales of Halo 2. And with what I do for a living, I talk to people who are running everything from the latest-and-greatest computers to ones that are hitting their decade of service. (Not much we can do for those, but we DO get Windows 2000 and Windows 98 users.) In this case, I'd say you were wrong - think like *both,* because a not-insignificant number of people aren't just looking at a $109 Windows 7 Home upgrade disk, but a several-hundred-to-several-thousand-dollar computer purchase. Just browse through all the Ultra Mode question threads and Tech Questions here. Some of these systems *won't* run Win7, or won't run it well enough to game on.

If you stop your consideration at "Oh, well, they can just wait a month 'til they can get a Win7 upgrade disk" (ignoring that you can't upgrade in-place from XP to 7) you're not looking at it realistically *now.* A couple of years, sure. Now, no.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Agreed, more or less. The point is that, eventually, 4-5 years from now, when I would expect to see CoH2 launch, Vista and 7 will be the base, unless some better Microsoft OS came out.

-Rachel-

I wouldn't look at the overall market - a business that buys 10,000 PCs isn't going to matter as far as gaming. I'd look specifically at gaming sites.

For instance, yes, you're showing Win7 at only 8% of the market - but heading to Steam and looking at their (pretty heavily gamer-leaning, I'd say ) stats, DirectX 10 OSes (Vista and Win7) are used by 49% of the respondants. I'm sure there are other sites like that as well that'd give you a better idea of your target audience.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Okay. All 3 of you need to drop by this site: http://www.khronos.org/

You'd be looking for this page: http://www.khronos.org/opengl/

City of Heroes leverages the OpenGL Application Programming Interface (API) for it's graphics support. This means that the base graphics engine is not tied to the operating system. Developers who write to the OpenGL API do not have to worry about what Operating System their graphics code will be run on. All they have to worry about is whether or not the physical hardware and drivers for that Operating System support the calls of the OpenGL API.

Currently ATi/AMD maintains an identical OpenGL stacks across all of their directly supported operating systems. It is presumed that Nvidia also maintains an identical OpenGL driver stack across it's operating systems, but Nvidia has never exactly confirmed this. Intel and Via (S3 Chrome) do not maintain identical OpenGL drivers across all of their operating systems.

Because OpenGL is crossplatform, graphics code written to the OpenGL 3.2 specification will produce the exact same image providing the driver correctly processes the information. OpenGL 3.2 is roughly analogous to Microsoft's DirectX 11. Since OpenGL 3.2 is crossplatform, this means that say, a game, coded against OpenGL 3.2 would give the exact same image in Windows 9x, Windows NT5, Windows NT6, Apple OSX, and any distribution of Linux with OpenGL 3.2 enabled drivers.

A game coded against Microsoft DirectX 11 will only give an identical image on systems that support DirectX 11. When placed on a platform that does have the DirectX 11 API, a game would have to fall back to an earlier version of DirectX.

This is why DirectX is a multi-billion dollar mistake for the commerical games industry. Using DirectX increases development time to work on extra rendering paths against different operating systems, and even then, causes additional work at a later date since DirectX is not supported on Wii, Linux*, Apple OSX*, Iphone, Android, Playstation 2, or Playstation 3.


*Okay, officially supported. You can stop pointing at WINE, Cider, and Cedega now.


If the developers started on City of Heroes 2 today, they would probably continue using OpenGL as the API, so discussions about which OS the game would run on are moot.

I vote NO.

Bugging the Devs with threads on this suggesting won't be effective if they read through the posts & see more NOs than YESs.