A Business Focused View of NCSoft's Actions

It depends on the company. I will be the first to admit I don't understand how game companies are organized. I come from a manufacturing background, the companies I worked for could trace their management systems straight back to the railroads and steel giants. My company I expected to know whenever a pin dropped.

Looking at CoH it's like NCsoft didn't bother to manage it at all. Someone posted an anecdote about how a Paragon studios programmer got hired and told to work on whatever bug he thought was important, after spending months on something that was around for 8 years and coming to the conclusion it was unfixable. I know if that happened in my company, the first thing that would have happened is that my fist would have put a new set of dents in my office walls, then I would have had a long talk with whoever hired a person without a clear reason for doing so and an expectation on how they would pay back. Over the years you have also had paragon studios make self serving statements such as "We can't trace players leaving to particular changes". My response to that would have been to ask the division manager why I was signing his paycheck if he didn't understand how the company worked and what was motivating the customers.

That's ok -NCsoft doesn't know how they're organized either.

Yet they are incredibly successful in the business. So they are either proof that "It's smarter to be lucky than lucky to be smart" or are crazy like a fox

They wouldn't need to discard so many of their products if they were that successful.

How many failed attempts did Edison have on his inventions ? On a closer to home note, I wish my failed products had the ROI theirs managed

Edison's famous invention, the lightbulb?

He bought one of the key patents behind it off two guys in Toronto.

To remain successful you don't get sentimental about the parts of a business that aren't delivering.

And if you aren't sentimental about those parts, you dispose of them to the highest bidder.

Psst. Just because we would like them to sell hardly means they see it in their best interests.

True, you hold on to them on principle instead.

Guild Wars, Aion...

Throwing something away and not letting anyone else have it, when you could get something for it, isn't in their best interests either.

Their best interest is having an auction and auctioning it off to the highest bidder. The IP will only be worth even less once the game is completely dead.

That seems to be the consensus here. Then again most of the people posting it don't run billion dollar gaming companies.

Here is a little thought for you. The Batman IP actually became more valuable after laying fallow in terms of television and movies. It needed distance from what it was so it could become something new.

Anyway a simpler explanation is that CoH is worth more as a loss to NCsoft than it is as a sale.

You do know that the Batman IP may have not appeared in tv or movies but was appearing in print that whole time it was "laying fallow". More importantly, the history of Warner Brothers is such that its reasonable to believe in the future Warner Brothers will be able to make money from a superhero movie or tv show.

As compared to NCSoft, who has no history of ever making anything from the IP of the games it shuts down, and by their failure to promote the game in their primary market makes it unlikely they'd be able to make a profit with that IP in the future.

And there is no accounting trick that makes CoH worth more as a loss to NCSoft than a sale.

You are a Korean Tax Accountant ?

Edit: I have seen lots of tricks in the U.S. code where it could be of great benefit to have a loss. Admittedly most tax shelters are gone but they were very good for a very long time.

No, but he saw Gangnam Style on You-tube.

They even made a popular play about such money making schemes! I think Uwe Bowe even made lots of money doing just that with terrible movies!

There are investments that can be set up to generate losses way above the original investment. In the US most of those have been banned, it's conceivable that they may still be legal in Korea.

But you have to set them up from the start. Having an existing business that's been bringing in profit as opposed to losses, and shelving it, won't work for those tricks.

The Producers was simple fraud. Whatever I may think of the decisions made by NCSoft, I doubt they're committing simple fraud.

Uwe Bowe took advantages of huge tax advantages in some jurisdictions for making movies. Those tax advantages have been repealed which is why you haven't seen any Uwe Bowe movies for a while, and I'll go on record as supporting that tax increase.

Is it conceivable there's something special in the Korean Tax Code that "if you kill a computer game, you get to deduct every penny spent on the game even if you've previously deducted it but if you sell it no break for you"? Wallace Shawn would call that inconceivable, but I'll grant it's barely within the bounds of possible. But I'm assuming a reasonably rational tax code in Korea.

Paragon studios as an entity isn't that old. They got set up as their own entity no more than 3 or 4 years ago. Less I think.

Depends on how you define it...

NC NorCal was set up at the time of CoX purchase from Cryptic (so late 2007). This was later renamed to Paragon Studios in April 2009.

So between 3 and 5 years, depends on which side you want to take.

Sounds about right.