Hostile take over anyone?

Let me preface this post by saying that aside from incarnate trials, there's not a lot in CoH that's still fun for me. I had resubbed for water blast, a three month deal, and it ends sometime in late October.

However, I'd been playing this game for a long time. As of late, out of habit more than anything else. As I was reading through, I read how some are more than willing to fork over extra cash to keep playing the game.

Now, I haven't done the math. Others are far better at that than I am.
But, have we considered stock? As in, purchasing shares of NCSoft?

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=0...rce=undefined;

I did a google for figuring out how to go about doing this, as I'm not at all familiar with the Korean Stock Exchange. I found a couple of interesting links.

Now, I could be way off, way wrong. But, from the books I've read, majority stockholders make the decisions by essentially telling the Chairman what to do, or he/she gets voted out.
As I look at the graph and other data, it looks like a lot of shares are outstanding, 19.82 million. And, scary thing is, each share appears to sell for about 254 bucks.

Well. This is likely cost prohibitive for many of us, but if each of us bought 1 share through some broker, pooling our resources, we might be able to make some noise as investors in the company.

Obviously, buying shares in bulk for any one person -- well, odds are, folks with that kind of money probably aren't playing CoH in the first place - but, hey, we never know.

Some of you who are more capable of thinking outside the box may be able to garner a better slant to this.

I do think that a letter to the chairman and a few other key people should be written with these values in mind. http://global.ncsoft.com/global/abou...siongoals.aspx

Obviously, there's a great deal of information the playerbase is in the dark about. From what I recall of my studies (way back a long time ago), it's very easy for a decision to get made and then ...the powers that be realize a decision may be what's best for the shareholders, but it conflicts with the company's mission statement. A phrasing has to be made that will allow the chairman to realize that to close the doors to Paragon Studios conflicts with their mission statement.
Let's also not discount the spirit of NCSoft. Being brave about doing what is right.
With the lack of information we have, it doesn't seem like they are doing what is right - but we don't have all the facts.

Odds are, it has something to do with the announced expected purchase of 14.7% of company stock being bought by Nexus on June 8.
I don't know who has the largest % ownership of NCSoft stock. It may be Nexus, or it may be any number of other people or companies. If someone is in the stock trade business, they may be in a better position to get this information. Or, perhaps someone who has a broker can just ask their broker to see if they can find out.

If we can get the votes to save the game, and have the issue brought up at the next stock holders meeting, we could save the game. Just a shame this company isn't in America - I could definitely see myself cold-calling some shareholders and asking them for a favor.

Again, I could be all wrong - I'm not at all sure how South Korea does business in their stock market. Perhaps all it would take is a call from one of our congressman to their chairman. After all, if we pull out of South Korea, bad things would happen. (all over a game - not bloody likely, and it's quite silly to even contemplate)

In any event, perhaps one of you can find some sliver of this idea and make it better.

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"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

That $687 million purchase made Nexon the single largest investor in NCSoft.

Without adjusting for changes in the price of the stock since then, just to get a 1% share of NCSoft would cost just shy of $47 million. I don't think we could reasonable purchase enough shares to gather enough influence... and if we were able to raise enough money, it likely would be better use elsewhere (such as paying NCSoft to sell the IP+code and creating an independent Paragon Studios, and funding that).

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The shareholder option is a non starter - the kind of money you'd looking at for it could be used to rehire the dev team and finance a whole new superhero MMO.

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

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Not to mention, buying up enough NCSoft stock to be able to hold sway in that kind of decision means sudden responsibility for the future of the company as a whole - including all those other MMOs and the studios working on them.

While I will applaud anyone rich and crazy enough to do that, I highly doubt they would - you don't get that kind of money by being the kind of person that will throw it all down just to save their favourite game, you get it by having a shrewd business head.

Seeing as you've raised the idea of crowd-funding though - just in case you're not aware, although you probably are - you should take a look here:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ard,134.0.html
TonyV and the Titan crew are working on a few avenues of approach to save CoH, and a Kickstarter to raise funds is one of them (although not in action just yet).

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"Hard pressed on my right. My centre is yielding. Impossible to manoeuvre. Situation excellent. I am attacking." - General Ferdinand Foch

For that amount of money I'd buy some stocks, and on the day we celebrated that we had enough for some serious shareholder influence, I'd sell mine off before the value dropped dramatically due to reality setting in for the other shareholders.

So I guess I'm saying... let's do eeet! =D

-Burn Sucka
"Melt 'Em Like Butters!"

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I thought about this. Unfortunately, as people have already pointed out, there is no realistic way to raise this kind of money via normal donations. They have a market cap of around $5billion; you would need $2.5 billion at minimum to buy them, and there are not enough of us to have that kind of money lying around.

If such a plan were to be attempted, I would think the best way would be to have a reputable investment institution set up a fund for the purpose. Have the fund's stated goal be to collect investment funds and hold them in bonds until sufficient value had been collected to make a buyout offer, then buy out NCSoft.

The idea would be that you could move people's 401ks into such a fund, and if it never reached its target, they would be relatively safe and treated like a normal bond fund. I don't know about anyone else, but I definitely have a -lot- more money in my 401k than I do in cash on hand; we might actually have $2.5 billion in the player base that way. You might not even need to get that high, since the threat of a hostile takeover could provoke concessions from NCSoft with no real takeover attempted, similarly to greenmail payments.

Someone would have to do an analysis to see if such a plan makes any financial sense though. Corporate raiders do stuff like this all the time, but they usually choose targets who have net assets that can be sold for profit after the purchase and are easy to take over, and I have no idea how vulnerable NCSoft is or how much their assets are worth if sold.

Such a plan would only work if it actually made financial sense. When you're talking billions, you're talking real money, and anything on that scale has to be a plan to make money, not just make a moral stand.

It actually might not be that bad of an idea for an investment company to set up a fund like this though, unless there is some legality I am unaware of. By far the most likely thing that would happen would be for a bunch of people to transfer their 401(k)s to them, fail to reach sufficient funds to buyout NCSoft, then have it operate pretty much like a normal investment fund.

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So, now, wait a sec...I'm a little slow but something just clicked. Since Nexon is the largest stock holder currently...couldn't we write them as well and try to get them on our side to help save our game? Odds are I'm a day late to this logic, or well, much of anything logical since my baby has been having a beyond rough week adjusting to his first week of school. Feel free to point me to the right address(es) to send a letter to them if the logic is correct and already posted elsewhere, that'd be MUCH appreciated so thanks in advance!

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Liberty!
Black Dawn/Shattered Dawn
Chaos Legion