Why? The Answer is in NCsoft's August 8th Earnings Report

In the end, anyone that played Tabula Rasa knows this is standard procedure for NCsoft regarding US Games. They forged a letter in Richard Garriot's name (while he was in space quarantine!) to allude that he was leaving just so that NCsoft could fire him and force him to sell his stock at a low point costing him millions.....then they shut that game down.

Also, for those who want ammunition for the "They shuttered CoH for their servers" argument:

http://techland.time.com/2012/08/29/...me-experience/

Why don't you dig through the FY 06, FY 07 and FY 08 earning reports there and see how much staying power GW1 has? They'll still have server issues next year if they go down to 200,000 concurrent users on average (which they're marking around 400,000 right now)

NCsoft has reported that over 1,000,000 copies of GW2 has been bought, so I doubt they'll be in the red like you say either. Even a conservative estimate of 40 million in revenue will put it above Aion in terms of lion's share if Aion doesn't have a damn well good showing Q3.

I give up. Trying to get you people to actually understand financials and business is a waste of my time.

You should probably go back to your day job, advising Mr. Buffet apparently.

Not buying anything put out by NCSoft at this point. They've had plenty of time to cook their books in order to justify what they've done to us in order to losses elsewhere look less serious.

Now if that financial information was put forth by a legitimate and unbiased third party doing an audit of NCSoft, I'd believe it.

Why are we fixating on sales figures? Guild Wars is a game entirely funded by sales, yes, but City of Heroes is not. At one point it was entirely funded by subscription money, and was funded in large part by it right up until it shut down. Doesn't it make sense that sales numbers would be low?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

So. Money.

Likely that's the true killer of this game we have come to call home for a great deal of our lives.

However....last night as I was idly strolling/flying/jumping around zones and reminiscing....I heard several people talking about how NCSoft stocks were plummeting even as they watched and updated.

D'you think that the "lack of profit" of City of was a cause for its demise?
Well, we as gamers and customers just showed a corporation just how mistaken it was...if indeed the stocks fell as several people were claiming.

I can believe what they said, too. Gamers are a pretty faithful bunch, to a degree. When that totally asinine move was announced by NCSoft, I could see a boatload of investors going, "Time to bail!" for the simple reason that...we...the customer..the loyal fans...were hurt. Betrayed.

Corporate heads, VP's, board members...go home to live in forty room mansions. The people that the corporation employ...the people that MAKE the product/provide support for the product/generally work for "the man"...go home to live in an apartment with forty people to a room.

We need to change this social injustice. Time for greed to take a back seat.

It appears to me that CoH's sales were pretty much flat Q1-Q2. I can't imagine the expenses changed much in that time, so the performance was pretty much static. There is nothing in these figures to suggest that anything has significantly changed. We can't actually see costs for a game on its own or Paragon studios on its own.

It sounds like they just want to retrench and concentrate on games they know will sell in their core market of Korea and this isn't one of those, and I'm guessing neither was the other Paragon Studios project.

If they have tried to sell the game/studio on and nobody was buying, that's one thing, but simply explaining that, and the reason they're getting out of this market would remove a lot of the animosity.

This game has been notable for its great openness and communication, it's a shame the parent company can't live up to Paragon Studios quality in this area.

I'm afraid I can't see where this report points to a problem with CoH. I see a massive drop in sales for Aion and a massive drop in the Korean market. I also see a drop in profit due to "one-off" expensive (such as severance pay). No where in the report do I see any indication that CoH is causing a problem for the company. In fact, it appears the CoH is a relatively small piece of their overall picture that is completely overshadowed by their other areas.

Speaking from experience, cutting a revenue source because it's small is not a good way to do business. If your business is spending more than it earns then your best choice is to eliminate costs as much as possible while keeping all of your sources of revenue, even small ones. If Paragon Studios was consistently costing NCSoft more than it was earning and there was no way to cut costs then discontinuing the game would be a sound judgement call, but I see no evidence of that in this report.

But the biggest failure here has nothing to do with whether CoH was profitable or not, it has to do with bad community relations. The way they handled the situation has damaged their public relations and now they will have to spend even more money on marketing to try to overcome it.

In a world of mega corporations, the one voice the consumer has is with his or her money and I, for one, will not be giving any more of mine to NCSoft. It is the best and the only way we can show them how much we dislike what they have done.

(The flip side of that is, of course, that I will be taking my money to where ever our devs end up next.)

sigh

Okay, I think we can all agree that the vast majority of players in this game are from the North American (aka Western Hemisphere) and Europe. The Q2 earnings from these two regions is 6482 million KW or 5% of NCSoft's earnings excluding royalty income. CoH earnings was 2855 million KW. If nearly all of CoH income comes from the NA and EU regions then CoH represents 44% of the income from these regions.

Yes the game is a small fish when compared to their hugely successful games in Asia (Korea, Japan and Taiwan represent 95% of their income base) but we are a big chunk in our neck of the woods. Now perhaps NCSoft is looking at withdrawing development support from the NA and EU regions now that GW2 is done since all the one time sales of that game will bolster the income from NA and EU regions for sure in Q4.

Their major MMOs from Asia obviously aren't hitting it off here that well. Maybe they decided they simply don't grok us and write the region off, just cash in on the GW2 sales for the short term, maybe finance an expansion pack or two if sales of the core game continues strong, but if I worked for ArenaNet, I'll be worry that their owners won't be interested in another costly multiyear development cycle for a GW3.

And depending how far along Wildstar is coming along (as well as whether or not they think it'll play in Asia), they may go all Studio 38 on them as well.