Do you think if this game was better advertised early on...

I've pretty much lived on the Internet since 1996, but I don't remember seeing any advertising for this game. I'm also a comic book collector who purchased the first several issues of the CoH comic, and somehow I never made the connection that the comic was tied into a game. Meanwhile, I'd heard of Everquest, I'd heard of Ultima Online, and of course I heard about WoW.

Not to mention that, as far as I know, they never put any emphasis on the fact that you could play the game on a Mac. That kind of news gets around the Mac community, where we're accustomed to every new non-Blizzard PC game being "Windows-only". But I don't remember hearing anything. At least nothing that I still remembered by 2008 when I finally got a Mac capable of playing games like this.

ETA: I guess I should ask - was this game Mac-compatible from Day One? Or was the Cider wrapper thing added later?

The traditional 4-color comic super-hero is a bit of a niche concept compared to fantasy. It has strong appeal in America, and less so abroad. That's certainly one of the challenges, but also one of the strengths that City of Heroes has.

I think what films such as Avengers and X-Men have shown is that with the right twist, those same characters can have huge international appeal.

*hangs her head and sighs*

Y'know, I didn't want to make this public, but...

It's my fault. I'm the reason that they never advertised the game. They figured, "Hey, we've got this schnook doing it for free, why should *WE* spend money?"

Public stonings will be held on December 1st.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

I think NCSoft thoughthat they can't war with newly arriving Marvel MMO (I doubt they checked what kind of game it is they just knew marvel was releasing something to do with MMO) with all the movies and such they though CoH will not have any chance along with other secret reasons it was a good time like any to cancel game.

For outselling WoW. Superhero genre probably can't do that. Other than USA and some European contries Superhero genre is not popular. Most of world knows marvel and DC and again most countries don't have any ongoing superhero genre on their own. But all countries have some sort of myths and fantasies that is fantasy genre is more popular than any (and yes sci-fi is also limited though not as much as superhero genre).

WoW's advantages that CoH didn't had;

1) Blizzard was already a successful company and had a good fanbase in both USA, europe and Asia. Only company that comes close to this is Bioware but their products are have less impact on Asian market.

2) Blizzard was releatively recently released their mew Warcraft expansion and was successful in seeling game so it would fit to continue story. If they released any other game as MMO (like Diablo or Starcraft) it may have been successful but not a big hit as Warcraft (Diablo 2's ending was like an ending of all so continuing from there maynot good for starcraft there was a long gap and like I said fantasy genre is more accepted than any)

3) Blizzard didn't make any partnership with any other company they both produced and distributed WoW which means there was less paperwork when trying to make some decisions.

4) Time was good not only because there were less MMO's but people already got bored what is out there and were searching for something new. It is debatable CoH had same advantage but WoW came out after a few other fantasy oriented MMO's CoH was first and only superhero one at that time.

5) For 5 or 6 years (until Starcraft 2 released) Blizzard literally poured all of their power into WoW and this is something. We are talking about a studio that manage to get all kind of movie-stars to play in their advertisement. Blizzard took a gamble by pouring everything they have into WoW and be rewarded for that.

There are a few other points but these are IMO major points.

It seems to me that NCsoft doesn't believe in the subscription model. Based on their behavior, they assume that gamers buy the latest thing on impulse, play it like crazy for a week or a month until they're burned out, leave for a while, then return when another expansion comes out, which they burn through in a few days. Then they move on for good.

Advertising an eight-year-old game this past summer would have been viewed as a waste of money, even though Avengers was a huge hit, because those impulse-buying gamers knew that CoH was ancient and therefore unworthy of their attention.

The problem with MMOs is that it's flat-out impossible to make enough content to keep short-attention-span players who want to race from zero to level 50 (or 80 or 85) in a day and half of non-stop keybanging. I'm guessing a large percentage of purchases of MMOs are soloists who treat MMOs like standalone games that they "beat," and then they move on to the next thing.

If that's the way players really behave, then the CoH model is a financial loser compared to the GW2 model (only $15 revenue for a month's subscription compared to $60 for GW2). F2P only makes that calculation worse. Granted, some small number of players will hang around for years, but the lost opportunity costs make CoH a poor investment in corporate board rooms.

The CoH devs did a ton of things to encourage people to team, I presume in order to engender a feeling of community and attachment to other players, all in the effort to promote long-term subscribers. I'm guessing players of CoH, and perhaps hard-core MMO players in general, are more mature and stable than computer gamers in general.

CoH players are like loyal Ford customers who always buy F150s and keep them until the odometer rolls over a few times. But NCsoft doesn't want to sell F150s, even though they might make a decent profit at it.

They want to sell iPhones, because they know iPhone owners always have to have the latest iPhone, and will ditch the old one the instant a new one comes out.

It may be as simple as NCsoft thinking they should be more like Apple than Ford.

I think the premise of this thread is flawed if we're comparing ourselves to the success of WoW. City of Heroes had a pretty solid subscription number for many years. WoW was and is the giant outlier. Witness many of the games that have debuted since that started strong and withered within months. If you've got several hundred thousand playing your game, you're doing well. If you've still got several hundred thousand accounts 5 years later, you're in the minority.

Marketing could have been different, but not in the beginning of the game. Remember that Cryptic was a start up, and no one had done a Superhero game before. There were very few console games that were better than mediocre, let alone something online. If a game doesn't hit the marketing hard at the beginning, no amount of push later is going to make much of a difference unless you're totally revamping the product. Word of mouth served this game very well, probably better than most.

WoW is a world of its own. That being said, friend that plays WoW told me they made a Kung-Fu Panda raid that needs 40 people because it has over a hundred million hit points...yeah. It's great that they have millions of monkeys pressing 12345 but when you're reaching the point of self-parody, might be time to take a step back and look at the game and see where it needs to go.

I can't speak for other European countries, but I've been claiming for the situation here in Spain for years.

Lets put an example... while in other countries Issue 14 (Architect) had a boxed version, here we could be consider ourselves lucky if we could find a dusted box of City of Villains... release version! which means Issue 6!... meanwhile shelves got crowded with all the new games from Blizzard, Activision and EA. We had no Good vs. Evil edition, nor Architect Edition, and barely a few Going Rogue boxes.

And that's about boxes, you can imagine having hours (so to speak) of Blizzard, Activision and EA games advertisements on TV, while no reference at all was made about CoH not even in PC games magazines like PC Games or Micromania... lets add these magazines are not "n00b", are being published since 1994 or so, so they should know the ropes already, my guess is if they didn't say anything it's because NCSoft Brighton or NCSoft main offices didn't move a single finger regarding spreading word about the mere existence of this gorgeous game, at least here.

What was the situation in other EU countries?