The "Why"

I wonder if the shutting of Paragon Studios had something to do with the unnamed project that some of the developers etc. had moved over too. NcSoft may have decided they were going to stop putting funds into the project, and instead of just shutting it down, shut down all of PS. (I.E. throwing the baby out with the bath water.) Shear speculation on my part.

I really don't think the licensing rumor holds water. There is some pretty basic math here. NCSoft posted a loss of 6 million. There were 80 people at Paragon. Assuming an average salary of 75k (yeah, that might be low for where they are in CA, I dunno), that comes out to... yeah... 6 million.

Is it sudden? Yep. Does it suck? Absolutely, especially for those 80 employees. But I don't think it is due to underhanded financial maneuvers related to a license. But this is a foreign company... one that has already shut down games (Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa) pretty quickly when the financials dictated it.

I am going to miss this game a lot, but I am going to miss the Justice community more.

If Cryptic is smart, they will snatch up as much of this newly available and experienced talent as they can afford.

What I find puzzling is the way that they are kicking everyone out the door.

When Auto Assault shut down, they kept the studio in charge until the last day.

When Tabula Rasa shut down, they didn't just keep the devs running it, they had a big end of the world event that fit the theme of the game perfectly and made for a truly legendary ending.

With City of Heroes, they shuttered the studio and are, apparently, putting the game on bare maintenance until a pre-ordained shutoff date. At this moment, at least, it looks like we won't even get Issue 24, let alone any kind of an end of the world final battle.

It feels like someone deliberately went out of their way to kill the game, not just shut it down for performance reasons.

I feel it would be best if NCSoft just came out and posted WHY they are shutting game down.

That would end all speculations....

You know what... I've seen two theories bouncing around in the forums: NCSoft license of the game engine is ending and they aren't/can't renew, or that CoH has started losing money for them.

What I haven't seen it the possibly law suits for copyright infringement could be the cause.



Who hasn't been guilty of stealing the look of a copyrighted character? I know I have a few, but changed the names enough that it shouldn't matter. They were tributes to the comicbook characters, not attempts to recreate them.

But in my just under 2 years of playing, I've seen several Hulks - each with the Hulk name included in the name, one She-Hulk with just a number after it to make it different, several Captain America clones - the only name of which I recall was something like "Rogers Agent of Sheild", a few Batmans, a couple of Supermans, etc.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter WHY the game is being unplugged... that was bound to happen eventually anyway.

But that doesn't mean we don't deserve to be told.

Not necessarily.

A lifetime ago, I was an acquisitions librarian for a major state university library, and although I wasn't directly involved in any way, shape, or form in our university library's licensing contracts, my boss--who was--showed our department what went into them. Most of her job involved negotiating and rewriting renewal contracts.

The dirty little secret of academic libraries is that their budgets are squeezed by two factors: serials costs, and licensing costs (particularly major search engines and serials databases, like EBSCOHost). These are licensed annually, and the private companies involved (EBSCO, Elsevier, etc). are cut-throat. If your college or university library can't pay, too bad. At the time, site-licenses were a particular nightmare, and still are for some smaller colleges and universities: "Well, we can sell you a discount license, which will allow you to have the internet database, but only two users can use it at the same time." The college I teach at now lost the Opposing Viewpoints database license (which was one of these discount two-user-only site licenses) about three years ago, in part due to budget cuts and in part because OV jacked their annual price up substantially. Furthermore, the amounts these licenses rise far exceeds the rate of inflation. When I was in acquisitions, the average serials and database licensing rose 12% annually. We were always on the lookout for journals we could cancel. Again, when I was in ACQ, regional university and college libraries were starting to band together (basically unionizing) to try force the publishers to lower their rates ("If you charge x, none of us will buy your database, then") or to sidestep the process entirely (which gave birth to JSTOR).

In any event, my point is that I know, with absolute certainty, that license renewal contracts with open-ended renewal options not only occur, but are standard in academic publishing and in academic database/IP/search engine softwares. I certainly wouldn't presume to say that's true across the entire private sector, but I'd hazard a guess that it is not unheard of (and, in my opinion, probably standard, as it is within the academic sector).

[Edit: Regarding the overall premise of the OP, it makes a lot more sense to me than "the CEO is crazy/irrational". I don't like explanations that require entities to be behaving irrational in order to work. Ultimately, they don't fit Occam's Razor. I know that business doesn't always--or even often--operate rationally, but I also don't like premising explanations on the insanity of the actors involved.]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville In that case, the amount would be negotiable in the contract because both sides do not know what the value of the content will be in five years. But in this case, I personally would not have signed the contract without a right to renew at a specified cost. The value of the original game engine cannot rise, separate from inflation.

Cross-post:
Ironically, Champions Online celebrated its 3rd year anniversary today and we had a quick company-wide meeting that where last Friday's bombshell about City of Heroes/Paragon came up.

During Q&A time with Jack, I pont-blank asked him if there was any truth to the rumors about expired licensing agreement with Cryptic's COH engine. He was taken aback about this, unaware of such rumors going around. His response was that NCSoft has the license to use the CoH engine "in perpituity" for both "City of Heroes/City of Villains" as well as a 2nd game.

I asked him if there was going to be any official response to this rumor concerning Cryptic/PWE and it's not something we plan on doing. We obviously can't be aware of or comment on every rumor floating around on the internet he wasn't sure of what they could say about this particular scenario if they wanted to.

So whatever reasons NCSoft had for shuttering Paragon, it had absolutely nothing to do with the IP, which they own, or the engine, which they had a license to use indefinitely.

That's about all I can do to quell this rumor. Take it as you will.

Again, thoughts go out to all my friends, former co-workers, and recent friendly rivals who've been released into the wild. I hope to see many of them here in the halls of Cryptic very soon. :P

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is an intellectual property license that lasts in perpetuity different from an outright sale of that intellectual property? As I posted above, I've got more than a passing familiarity with how licensing works in an academic setting, and I can't say I've ever run across such a beast.