Does it really matter in the end?

We're all upset that our beloved game is coming to an end with most probably NC Soft refusing to sell based on either potential competitor reasons or because they can probably get a hefty tax break. When all is said and done, does it really matter in the end if they win this round? There's a lot of buzz going around in the online gaming world that the MMORPG may be entering its twilight years as gamers are losing interest in them as time moves on. There are many reasons for this: The most important of which is that the demographic that made World Of Warcraft so huge (Generation Y) has aged and is now concentrating on other things such as families or careers.

In the end, given NC Soft's recent financial woes and MMO companies trying to steal players from one another from a dwindling pool of MMORPG players, don't you think that NC Soft will eventually "get theirs"? I certainly believe they will. Why? Well, MMO's aren't necessarily growing per se; there seems to be the same demographic and population of players shifting from the newest game to the next.

One indication of this is the user attrition that World Of Warcraft is experiencing. Many of those in the gaming world have known for a very long time that W.O.W.'s American subscribers began to move on years ago and that with Blizzard's expansion into the Chinese market, on paper it made it seem as if everything was fine and that the existing players were there to stay. Within a few years time those bolstered numbers were soon revealed as only a stopgap: Blizzard went from boasting of having over 13 million subscribers to our current day's numbers of nearly half that. The MMO pool is shrinking, my friends, and all NC Soft can ever hope for (if Guild Wars 2 is an overwhelming success) is to steal a piece of that ever growing stale piece of pie.

My point of all of this is that given the plight of the current world economy, NC Soft's financial distress, NC Soft's rudderless management (as expressed by former NC Soft employees), and the aging of the MMO target demographic, I have sincere doubts that NC Soft will be the same semi-large developer it is today 5 to 10 years from now. Even though City Of Heroes will be gone within the next two months, realize that mismanagement brings misfortune and NC Soft's house of cards will soon come tumbling down if they keep up with their shady business tactics. Let us not forget that almost every major financial move made by NC Soft in the past ten years has been a half baked gambit to turn a profit or stay afloat. With business executives making those types of decisions at the helm, there is no chance in hell they'll ever be the success they aim to be in the end.