Rumor: Reason for the shutdown.

You bet it is. I mentioned in another thread how a company in my home town up and left over the space of a weekend without saying a word to any of the employees. The employees went home on Friday, the company packed up everything in the entire building in the space of two days and left for Mexico, and the employees returned on Monday to an empty office building. 100+ people suddenly unemployed and between paychecks with no warning.

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.

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

The same stunt with the license was done to the Babylon 5 Wars. The publisher was trying to renew the license and the IP owner (Time Warner?) simply refused with no explanation.

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.

Ok, take your racism and shove it, please.

Which is either good or bad.

which means that the chance of a pickup by another company is nill.

The good is enough backlash and boycotting could cause them to go for a last minute negotiation save.

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.

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.

And the thing is, I'm not sure there's any reason that anyone but the lawyer types would be. Or heck, maybe they were aware that there was a fine print thing saying "in the event that X and Y and Z and W happen, Licensor shall have the right to revoke this agreement by giving 90 days' written notice and a one-time payment of $N". Or something like that.

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?

/signed

This.

NCsoft and PWE.

It would be a disastrous business decision to pull the license like that. Yeah, by pulling the license, they eliminate a competitor.. but they also eliminate any kind of confidence in their brand, which is more important. Other companies and development houses would see PWE as toxic if they did that. If PWE will do that to NC, what would stop them from doing it to anyone else? No, as ruthless as PWE is, they are too smart for that.

NC on the other hand, has shut down at least seven games at varying levels of development and profitability. CoH may have been barely more than a blip on the radar next to NCs big games, but it was still healthy and profitable, especially by western standards.

I think this is NC. They took a huge loss over the last year because of that game that starts with "A", and they may have shut down Paragon in order to use it as a tax writeoff.

Also, many of you may not know this, but CoH was not the only game Paragon had in active development. They had another, unnamed project in development for at least a year, and I seriously doubt that was using the Cryptic engine. There would be no reason to also can that game if CoH was having licensing issues.

So licensing issues are unlikely, and CoH was profitable...

No, this has nothing to do with PWE, and everything to do with NC and its long history of culling games that aren't doing precisely as well as they want, even if they are profitable, and CoH was making around $10 million a year profit.

NCSoft wasn't exactly tactful in the way they treated PS.

That's the real question.

Tax write-off?

That's why this thread is titled "rumor." It's really all speculation at this point. All we know for certain is that PS was unceremoniously axed by NCSoft.