NCsoft Q1 2010 financials out: ouch.

Someone should figure out how much money CoH has earned NCSoft in total. If it was $2.6 million per quarter for 6 years it would be $62.4 million! Wow!

Actually, a lot of it has to do with marketability.

Forget WoW for a moment, sure it's six years old as well but there's a better example that is on par with what you're trying to say.

Everquest is nearing the 11, that's right 11, year mark. It's player base declined substantially when WoW came out and has never recovered.

However, like City of Heroes, Everquest has a loyal (smaller) player base and has been entrenched for the past 6 years refusing to let the game go completely into the quiet night.

Sony, a company with a not so stellar track record for treating MMO communities well, knows the Everquest name has this loyal fanbase and uses it to pitch new ideas and development. The game, long ago, paid for itself and has a development staff (currently) on par with (you guessed it) CoH.

City of Heroes just won a major award here in the states for being a great SciFi MMO. That has marketability behind it. Going Rogue is going to cultivate a spike like CoV did and that is marketability.

NcSoft is not a small company, but it does understand the difference between a game not reaching the public eye and one with a loyal fanbase. If you look at the bottom of the screen and look at how many people are online using these forums, that is marketability. (Yes, that means the nice people that pay $15 a month just to Doom Cry count toward marketability.)

As long as the loyal fanbase stays put City of Heroes, like Everquest, will have a long and healthy life.

Never mind. Was responding to a Page 1 post.

Hey, Black Pebble, can we get some insight from Marketing on this one?

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

What would marketing have to say about this?

Not that they often have anything to say whatsoever. :P

Honestly this is not much of a surprise. Reasons:

1. No significant endgame

2. No significant PVP

3. The trial experience is just terrible. You only get to play the 14 most annoying levels in the game, and get almost no communication tools that don't require veteran knowledge or better than average (read: idiot) resourcefulness to discover. The best communication tool trials can use is help channel. If the trial user is smart enough to try that channel, they are immediately presented with a chat bug, and even a computer savvy person would not take that error message as a clue that they should wade through the command list to find /hc. If somebody sends you a PM, there is no reply command even though such a command could not be used by spammers. You don't get travel powers, among the more unique features, until the end, unless, again, you already know how to get temp powers.

4. The community is better than most MMO communities, but, possibly related to #3, has issues with being quite insular. Some people like to ridicule others for bringing up common topics, using terms from other games, not knowing some info, etc. ESPECIALLY since I14. Around that release some dev or mod made a post about how lots of new people were starting to join, and suggested that the community treat them well. Of course, since then there are people who think any newbie is a DIRTY SPOITER, and many more who take great offense to a 50 who doesn't know what X is. As if the newbie deserves to be insulted because they took the most advantageous teams available to them.

5. There hasn't been much in the way of "things to do" since i12 2 years ago. Systems are more important than content, but the systems that have been added are more about customizing how you do things. The standouts since then are are power customization, which is a far bigger success than I imagined it could be, and manages to completely dominate the miniscule power customization in CO, and AE, which adds lots of content but got a mostly wrong reputation as farmland, making it hard to get teams. These are major features that add value, but not particularly different ways of doing things like i9 or i11 did. After i9, i10, i11, and i12 beefed up the game in under a year, far more than it has been since, there is a strong sense that GR is make or break.

6. Ridiculously repetetive gameplay with walls of the same enemies in the same maps. This is kind of related to #1, because farming money is basically what the endgame is.

7. There was a need to clean up hero content, especially low levels.

Devs used I17 to address 7, and GR deals with 1, 5, and possibly 6 depending upon how it works.

3 could be dealt with easily and it's amazing to me that it hasn't been. Just add /reply, let trials do just a little more (level 25 is an ideal get a taste level as it is just after SOs, but before tier 9s), and fix help chat, which is a case of the chat tab simply using a different chat command.

4 is something that the players have to do. Don't be tolerant of such behavior.

2 is probably going to be an issue that won't be addressed without so many resources that they won't do because there isn't enough of a PVP userbase. It has to go way beyond balancing powers and even mechanics and into incentives, venues, etc.