Why was COH killed by NCSoft?

I would like to compile a list of the reasons people heard either through the forums, in game, from friends, from enemies, or from spectral voices as to the contributing reasons why NCSoft killed CoH. You could also include any other depraved acts that NCSoft may have committed in the past. Really I don't give a ****. Just make something up. We could all use a laugh at someone's expense at this point. And that someone is NC Soft.

Remember that the boards may or may not be monitored. Assume they are not.

It's Nemesis' final plot.

If you want insight into the brilliant minds of NCSoft, take a look at STEAM right now and see how many players are logged into DCUO and Champions online.

1,369 and 416 respectively. Accounts logged into CoH forums? 2652 Members 12K guests.

GG.

Because NCsoft are massive dillholes who kill everything you love.

Note that Champions Online is losing money. Its parent company is keeping it afloat as a loss leader so as to get a toehold in the MMO market in North America.

On a purely financial evaluation, it should have been put down two years ago.

Maybe its parent company can buy CoH and have a profitable toehold instead?

We can only hope, we can only hope.

Reasons I've heard:

The company that owns cryptic (which owns CoH's game engine) did not allow NCSoft to lease its property any longer.

While CoH does make money, it doesn't make -enough-, at least, not enough to justify spending heaps of cash on re-licensing the engine for whatever huge fee "Perfect World" came up with. Paragon Studios only supplied 1-2% of NCSoft's earnings. If it would have cost NCSoft more to re-lease the game engine than what CoH makes for them, discontinuing it is a no-brainer.

Still, the very SUDDEN nature of this all makes me wonder if there wasn't something else at play.

What really gets me is that the game and its underlying engine have both been updated, improved, and changed so much, that I bet NCSoft would have a decent chance of being able to claim rights to it. Or heck, why not just keep the dev team on and have them make a NEW engine? Why not bide for time or something?

This all seems very suspect to me...

A long time ago I worked at a company that had a number of wholly own subsidiaries. The subsidiary that I worked for, even though it didn't earn the most revenue in dollars, did produce the most profits dollars. So much so that if we had a bad year, the company had a bad year. Of course this meant we were the ones that suffered the staff cuts when the company's profits were down since we were their only profit center.

It doesn't have to make sense. Tax laws don't help it. We once destroyed a whole lot of consumables that customers used in our products (and we were the sole source) because we made more money on paper that way than by having a sale to flush the excess and perhaps garner some customer goodwill.

NCSoft is hereby LIFETIME BANNED from *EVER* receiving any money or compensation from me ever again in *MY* lifetime.

NCSoft killed Tabula Rasa (which I loved playing) and LIED to do it.
NCSoft has now killed City of Heroes and given the flimsiest of reasons for doing so.

That's it, NCSoft ... you're done. No more Benefit Of The Doubt ... EVER.



And I hope that there is an entire segment of the gaming population at large that feels the same way I do.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

I've always enjoyed talking down about SOE because of how they handled MxO's closure, SWG and the network haxoring. But for the record, for both games, they announced a cutoff date for players. For The Matrx Online, anyone who'd had an account in good standing was allowed back into the game for free the last three months. Star Wars Galaxies; anyone subscribed by the cutoff date in any capacity would be allowed to play the last three months. They also removed all instance timers and lvl restrictions during the last months, so lvling characters took hours, not days, heck the MxO devs made everyone level 99, then 100, then 101 and gave them dev abilities and powers Neo had. Granted the lvl cap there was only 50.

NCSoft gave people no prep time, at all. Unless they want to go down as worse than SOE at handling an MMO, they owe it to the players to give us all VIP status before the end. That or make us all fully leveled Incarnates.

By prep time I meant this; when SWG was going to close, players were told 6 months ahead of time, and were given until a certain date to resubscribe if they wanted to play the final months of the game. They had the option. With City of Heroes...nothing. If i'd known this was going to be the end i'd have found the money somehow.

And I DID support the game when it was subscription only. When Freedom launched I had nearly enough Veteran Rewards to get free access to the Invention System. That's alot of paid subscription time over the game's 8 years, not to mention buying the game's retail box, the CoV collector's edition, the Good vs Evil edition, the Going Rogue complete collection...I gave this game more money than I've given to any other over the years.

I know that the folks at Paragon Studios are in a horrible spot now. And i'm angry for them, unless they were told ahead of time, they came in to work one morning to work on future content for the game and were told that the studio was closing that day. That sucks. No way around that. No way to justify that.

What I meant by the free VIP time thing is that if these are the last months of the game they (NCSoft) should at least let us enjoy the game fully with what little time is left. That's all I meant. Just a chance to play the Apex TF or the Incarnate trials one more time. That content is locked now and i'll never get to play it again. I gave this game years and alot of my money. Not getting to fully enjoy it one last time feels like being cheated.

im sorry but NCSoft is also BANNED from my wallet FOREVER.
NEVER will i touch any product from the again.
i have to agree with an earlier poster on this.

Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, Exsteel, and now City of Heroes*, if I were an uninvolved third party, I'd be pretty cautious about buying any NCSoft game. Shutting down this many games does not speak well of NCSoft's financial stability, or their commitment to their customers and games.

Has any other major MMO company shut down that many games?

*Was that all of them? I think I missed one...

One of the theories I've seen floated is the loss of sales in CoH, which then links to NCSoft financial records. Well, here's a look at their sales since 2010:



Yes, CoH sales have dropped, but nothing compared to Aion. Any news of them axing Aion? Anybody? Bueller?