Where did the game go wrong?
By
Agonus,
Posted on: 2012-09-01 18:46 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
One thing I've never been able to figure out. NC Interactive (the NA subsidiary) has been bleeding money forever (I'd have to go look at the numbers again, but I know it's been red for as long as I've been watching it). Of course, that's PS, Carbine and the inhouse Aion conversion. I've never been sure if GW2 was included in that or not. There is a separate Arenanet entry, but the numbers there have been pretty small, so I don't think that GW2 development was in that.
So, is that constant red ink just a sign of the dev costs for GW2, Wildstar and the secret project? Or is there something I'm missing?
(All on Virtue)
Guidestar: lvl50 Grav/FF Controller
Madame Insight: Lvl 50 El/El Blaster
Astrolabe Lvl 50 Grav/Eng Dom
Too many others to consider.
Don't know if it ever went "wrong" but there were some things going against it:
1)Enhancement System:
This is the primary complaint I get from new players, they have no freaking idea how this works. It's easier with the color coding and such, but how many of each, which ones are better and the necessity of changing them every five levels appears burdensome.
2)Contacts unclear until recently:
In other games if you need to meet "The Big Tree" you get an arrow pointing down to it. Here you didn't, you had the waypoint system of course which is some help but a visual indicator around the contact would have been useful much sooner in the game's lifespan.
3)No "real" endgame outside of Hamidon for some time:
People got to 50 then either rolled an alt or unsubbed. The PvP was decent enough as an alternate endgame system.
4)Not enough "Outside" tasks and "Automatic loot acquisition":
Another complaint I've heard ad nauseam, no one is outside completing tasks, you don't need to click on mobs to get items so it cuts a lot of "downtime" between tasks. With no real inventory outside of Enhancements and Inspirations prior to Base Salvage, friends never got the impression they were gaining anything material for their efforts, shrugged and unsubbed.
5)It's a Niche:
Let's face it, Supers are a nice and though CoH did this quite well it got its market split three ways when Champions and DCUO came out.
A big hammer blow was City of Villains as well. People got split and with no way of switching sides until MUCH later (this should have been on the table as soon as split zones came through), you had people disbanding teams to play on one side or another, then many gravitated toward the hero side leaving redside a barren wasteland.
CoH is a fun game but it had a ton impeding it. Thankfully they had a TON of good stuff too, but probably not enough to make it anything more than a fun niche game you play in between breaks from other games.
Questions about the game, either side? /t @Neuronia or @Neuronium, with your queries!
168760: A Death in the Gish. 3 missions, 1-14. Easy to solo.
Infinity Villains
Champion, Pinnacle, Virtue Heroes
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Unfortunately, the devs couldn't give us warning.|
Originally Posted by Residentx10
They should of given us warning and asked us to spend more money. I would have bought more stuff to keep the game going.
Can someone confirm this stupid rumor about a COH2? I had someone mention this to me on facebook and I almost laughed. |
They probably knew SOMETHING was up. But the impression is that they were caught as flat-footed by this as we were.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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Okay, let's be fair to NCSoft here.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
the game "went wrong" when Jack talked NC into publishing it when nobody else would touch it. Corporate skullduggery/malfeasance/incompetence (depending on which flavor of rumor you prefer) killed this game, it was nothing the devs did.
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I know this isn't a popular sentiment right now but just go with me for a sec.
NCSoft has been a fairly good shepherd for CoH in the last 8 years. When Cryptic moved off to do "other things" that would have left CoH essentially static, Cryptic moved in, threw money at the problem and took over control of the game.
In that time (five years), with NCSoft at the reins, CoH has not only maintained, it's grown! They've thrown mad-money at the game, instead of just sitting back and siphoning it of all profit.
When they took over, Paragon had 16 people.
On Friday, they laid off over 80 people. And that's not counting the group of (mostly temporary) people they let go shortly after the roll-out of Freedom!
Does that HONESTLY sound like a company that just flat-out didn't give a damn about the property?
Not to me it doesn't.
Honestly, I think the bean-counters in charge (or with ownership stakes in the company) are pressuring NC to "trim fat" in the company in light of the recent quarterly non-earnings debacle.
Unfortunately, CoH was the odd man out for this.
Does it sucketh mightily? Hell yeah!
Is it understandable, given NC's perspective and position? Unfortunately.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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According to what I've seen (including info from BaBs), that doesn't seem to hold water.
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Originally Posted by BrandX
To my understanding it was a Cryptic/Re-licensing the Engine problem.
Cryptic wanted to get rid of the competition, so they raised the price of the license, NCSoft didn't think it would make back the investment. I think with i24, it totally would have. |
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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To reiterate something I said in another thread, The reason people won't let go of this rumor is that they want someone to pin this on and Cryptic has long been a target of derision since they left CoH.
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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
According to what I've seen (including info from BaBs), that doesn't seem to hold water.
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Not trying to take away from what you said but would be nice to verify those two numbers are comparable. I think the Freem 15 was developers and the 80 people includes everyone devs/non-devs alike.|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
When they took over, Paragon had 16 people.
On Friday, they laid off over 80 people. |
But i haven't been following the staffing changes closely...maybe someone can confirm the 15 number is the entire studio (Cryptic) at the time or its just the dev team? And they did add staff but if someone can also breakdown that 80 number...how many of those are devs?
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And just so my post isn't a complete threadjack...to the OP's topic:
I wouldn't go so far to use the word wrong...i'll leave that to game designers and historians. And i hope the following comment is taken as feedback and not as a "kick a person while they're down" thing.
But from personal experience and seeing the forums, the most often criticism i recall seem to be the repetitiveness (grindy) feeling people get the longer they play. I keep hearing calls of taking breaks from the game.
It's always been but maybe happening more often after the devs decided to nudge people away from streetsweeping and into instanced missions. It didn't just had the effect of the appearance of a less populated world but it also put focus on the repetitiveness of these games when you're seeing the same maps over and over.
It didn't help that there wasn't much to do after 50 except maybe farm which adds to the repetition or create alts which took you back through the same content and maps once again.
When they finally added a more clearly defined endgame, besides the complaints about the group requirement, there was once again concerns about repetition.
There are other things i can mention but maybe start with that for now.
I posted a much longer version of this for my SGmates, but I wanted to bring up a point that I haven't seen yet here that gives me a small semblance of hope for the future.
First, the scope of this is baffling because it's more than just a move that closes a producing revenue stream. It's a move that pulls NCSoft out of an entire MMO market niche, one that they already dominate with an 8 year old product. Keeping that alive is a no-brainer, and closing it is a giant step backwards in market development unless they know something we don't...
The mention of NC Soft trademarking City of Heroes 2 in April 2010 has been thrown all over here. What hasn't been brought up is that NC Soft signed the publishing agreement with Cryptic in early 2002, two years prior to publishing date. Two to two and a half years is a sweet spot for new trademarks: it's about half way through the 5 year duration of protection, enough time to be able to afford keeping quiet about the product, but starting to push the envelope for when you'd need to begin advertising it in order to sell it and KEEP the trademark.
I work for a company that deals with patents and trademarks all over the place - One might think that this was just an attempt to protect the name from infringement, but generally speaking if you're going to hold on to a trademark you actually have to make use of it within a certain period of time or you lose rights to it. In manufacturing that's easy, you make one thing with the name on it and you have precedent, but in software that would be a LOT more difficult I'd think. This leads me to believe that NC Soft wouldn't have gone for the trademark unless they planned on using it.
Further, as much as I hate to point it out... If NC Soft were developing a sequel, they wouldn't be just starting now, they'd have started some time ago with a devoted development team, seperate from the devs we know and love. Which means that if/when they decided to greenlight it... They wouldn't need Paragon Studios unless Paragon Studios was doing the development. Guessing that that's not the case.
In fact, if they launched said hypothetical sequel while CoH was still running, they'd split their playerbase between the old and the new, which might not be desireable with regards to having to employ two seperate groups of developers. It's a pretty cuttthroat and brutal move, but we're talking about the buisness world sadly 
I have a feeling that NC Soft might be aiming to avoid competing with itself on a new product... It's also interesting to me that this announcement comes on the heels of the GW2 launch, which must have caused a spike in stock values. Almost like they planned on buffering the predictable downturn from announcing the closing of COH with it.
I'm no more happy about it than anyone else here - probably significantly less so than most. I just wanted to share the idea, that maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel for the playerbase, at least in terms of something to play.
Marut, 50 FF/Rad/Power Defender - Champion
Leader of The Earthguard
Leader of The Galactic Empire
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I think Asia had other problems. Korean uses bank payments for everything. Here we use credit cards. Lots have made this mistake in Asia. Transferring bank payments globally is expensive($60 USD per transaction).
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Originally Posted by That_Ninja
As for the whole "City of Hero" fiasco, it wasn't because Asians hate western super heroes, it was because there was no such thing as end content in the game until like 4 years later, and in most of the MMO world, the end content is the main meat of the game.
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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Unfortunately, the devs couldn't give us warning.
They probably knew SOMETHING was up. But the impression is that they were caught as flat-footed by this as we were. |
I don't believe this...I think they knew. First, the game has no patches for 30+ days. Second, the content on the website stop being downloadable months ago. Why not release i24 so we can playout the final months. I wonder if i24 even exists now.
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Ashtur and Father made good comments about NCSOFT's "situation," when I was on the monthly calls, they mentioned that the in-game item business was not developing as quickly as they wanted. They felt with more items in the games, this would generate more revenues. I only played COH so and never wanted to play the other Ncsoft titles but did they have the bug issues like COH? I'm not trying to bash but I left for a year because of the problems with incarnate teaming system. It's hard to commit to the game when tech problems are everywhere. I spent lots of time snapshotting bugs but the game was so complex the "technical" support was worthless. Now, I wonder when they were fired?
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Only problem with that list of numbers, at least in one sense, is the US Dollar <-> Korean Won fluctuated quite a lot over that time period, even between quarters.
Here's that list converted into dollars based on average exchange rate for that quarter. CoH/V Revenues (Millions of US $) 2007 Q4 5.874 - NCSoft buys off Cryptic and forms Paragon Studio, Issue 11 (end of Nov) 2008 - 22.243 Q1 5.684 Q2 5.655 - Issue 12 (mid May) Q3 5.841 Q4 5.063 - Issue 13 (beginning of Dec), the "death" of PvP (by some) 2009 - 17.684 Q1 4.850 Q2 5.201 - Architect Edition Box came out, Issue 14 (early Apr) and Issue 15 (late June) Q3 4.425 - Issue 16 (mid Sep) Q4 3.373 2010 - 14.030 Q1 2.935 Q2 3.395 - Issue 17 (end of Apr) Q3 4.834 - Going Rogue Box came out, Issue 18 (mid Aug) Q4 2.866 - Issue 19 (end of Nov) 2011 - 10.933 Q1 2.734 - Issue 19.5 (beg of Feb) Q2 2.576 - Issue 20 (beg of Apr) and 20.5 (end of Jun) Q3 2.605 - Freedom, Issue 21 (mid Sep) Q4 3.018 - Issue 21.5 (beg of Dec) 2012 Q1 2.559 - Issue 22 (beg of Mar) Q2 2.485 - Issue 23 (end of May) Note the upswing in revenues when an actual physical box set shows up in a store. Yes the first two quarters of 2012 is down from 2011 by about 5%. Q2 was down only 3.5% from the previous Q2 in US dollars. Now if you look at all the games they call out in their quarterly presentation; Aion down 33.0% year over year Lineage II down 29.1% Lineage I down 11.8% GW down 43.3% CoH up 2.4% (when comparing revenue in KRW) So of all the games they called out individually, only CoH was up in KRW when comparing same quarters. Still down in US $ a tad but there is a worldwide economic downturn going on, just look at the revenues from every listed region; Korea down 12.3% Japan down only 1.2% Taiwan down 45.3% Europe down an incredible 86.1% North America down 16.2% Overall down 14.9% So every region's revenues were down. Revenues from every game they listed individually were down, except for CoH which is only down 5% if you take the exchange rate into consideration. From a cold calculating look at the numbers it appears on the surface that the graphic engine revamp in Issue 18 didn't spark a boost in users. Or Level 50 raids in Issue 19 and larger raids in Issue 20. Or the conversion to a hybrid F2P model. Or new content every quarter for the last nine quarters. We seem to be permanently stuck in the $2.5 to $3 million a quarter. On face value it wasn't the game not doing well, relative to the rest of their line, I think the reason is more esoteric, it missed projected targets or NCSoft believes the money they spent on Paragon Studio could be better spent on something else with a better rate of return than what this game made. Or it could be a case of making an example for the investors, showing they are trimming away portions of their business that aren't helping significantly in revenues or profits to "refocus on their core markets", some silliness like that. |
Does anyone have a breakout of how many played incarnate vs. sub-50? Golden Girl mentioned that incarnate play held steady but I don't believe this. I deleted my incarnate characters and played only sub-50 when I came back. I felt the powers were unremarkable in the incarnate game. I met/talked to many who were downgrading their subs.
Does anyone have any of the comics in PDF still? I had them but lost them when I moved to a new laptop last year. I'd like to get them so I can have some memories of the game.
If this game should survive somehow, I'll make sure next time, we have a grassroots promotion system. One of the things I was unhappy about was the focus on California only. This game could of had better penetration locally if we had "network." For example, I notice in local Microsoft stores now they play games nightly. COH could have been one of those games.
--Microsoft stores, select location and you should be able to see an event calendar.
http://content.microsoftstore.com/store/content/Events
I post this question but I was curious about everyone's opinion. This was not to bash. I took game design classes about a 1.5 years ago and COH was the model game. In the class, we studied Blizzard StarCraft and NCSoft Paragon studios. That's how I found out about the employee numbers for SC2.
I'm really sad this game is over. There was so much left to finish.
Personally, I feel F2P was the mistake. They gave up steady revenues for more potential growth but they gave away too much. Playing to level 50 without a sub is wonderful for players but not profitable for the owners. They should of did to level 30-35(completion of powers selection) and charged after that. The VIP stuff I felt was unremarkable. Do I need a dedicated server? Do I care about armor that expires every quarter? and they should of made the incarnate game more archetype focused. I hated that everyone had the same powers at the higher level.
That's my 2 cents.
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Thanks for the link, I tried this before but only the special editions download. The others are locked.
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Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
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Hmm, strange. Maybe it's a browser thing. I just "saved link as.." from firefox and it worked on any of them. Tried a couple at random.
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Originally Posted by Residentx10
Thanks for the link, I tried this before but only the special editions download. The others are locked.
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The special edition ones work but not the rest. I tried it on a Win7(IE9), Win8(IE10) and Ubuntu(Firefox) machine. You can save it and it will prompt for a location but the file errors on the "actual" download.
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Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
Hmm, strange. Maybe it's a browser thing. I just "saved link as.." from firefox and it worked on any of them. Tried a couple at random.
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Ah then maybe someone more technical can chime in.
All i can say is i just tried it on a couple random files...comic_12.pdf from the top cow section and bk_issue07.pdf from the blue king section and they both downloaded fine.
I can try a few more but i presume to get similar results.
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Just tried it Win 7, Chrome... managed to download *all* of the comics listed there...
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Originally Posted by Residentx10
The special edition ones work but not the rest. I tried it on a Win7(IE9), Win8(IE10) and Ubuntu(Firefox) machine. You can save it and it will prompt for a location but the file errors on the "actual" download.
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This is 100% correct. I go to Best Buy - I see absolutely no copies of CoH, CoV, Goung Rogue anywhere. All I see is WoW and a bunch of what I call tiny games like Tetris, Scrabble, etc. |
Originally Posted by Combat
... because it did too little to get itself in the hands of new players.
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I go to Game Stop, I do see a 60 day time card, but it's at the bottom of the kiosk and the clerk had to look for it when I asked where they were.
I visit You Tube, I see other games advertised but not a peep about CoH/CoV/GR.
I visit other sites, same thing. If they put any money into advertising, you couldn't prove it by me.
"Most people that have no idea what they are doing have no idea that they don't know what they are doing." - John Cleese
@Ukase
I've seen one advertisement for this game, ever. And its the one that led me here.
Advertisement isn't the /game's/ fault, though...it's the advertisement department's fault. And the parent company's fault. NCSoft is the big bad responsible for closure. Not the game. The game was a steady source of income. Just not how much NCSoft wanted. It was profitable, but not profitable ENOUGH. So, instead of cutting another more recent game that bled way more money that CoX EVER did....they ax this one because it's older.
Simple math and greed is the reason for the death of this game, nothing else.
Nothing about the game itself was bad. It''s weathered EIGHT YEARS of ups and downs. EQ and EQ 2 are probably the only games I know of that're older and still going and MMO's. Let's hope CoX can go where they did.
First, thanks for your currency conversion!
It's important to remember that NCSoft shut down not just CoH, but the entire studio.
We know that Paragon was actively working on another title; that Paragon has been hiring people for said title for at least a couple years; that, as far as we can tell, the new project had more bodies than CoH. Paragon, as a studio, was possibly losing money. That's OK if The Sekrit looked to be a hit ... but in the wake of SWTOR tanking, WoW losing players, and revenues down across NCSoft's core games, the market doesn't look particularly good for MMOs.
A twist: when Paragon pitched the new project to NCSoft, Paragon said, "Self-financed with CoH's revenue. Look at what we have lined up -- we should be able maintain our revenue, and possibly grow." It's possible that Paragon bit off more than it could chew at a VERY bad time for the industry (financial crisis, economic downturn, the shine coming off MMOs, whatever).
I suspect we're looking for bogeymen outside Paragon (Cryptic, NCSoft), while the fault could, conceivably, lie with Paragon's management (not the devs, mind you, but with management).