Posi Confirms: COH Largest and Most Active MMO Ever Shut Down
By
Adar_ICT,
Posted on: 2012-10-29 18:54 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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The problem with this sort of idea is two-fold. First where do you draw the line? Do companies that create an MMO have a legal responsibility to maintain it for as long as people want to play it? Because I'm pretty sure that would result in companies ceasing to make MMOs.|
Originally Posted by Rodion
The real problem is that players of MMOs have no legal rights to the virtual goods they paid real money for. Millions of people are currently paying billions of dollars for costume unlocks, powersets, vehicles and the like, in games like CoH, STO, Champions Online, WoW, yet these companies could pull the plug on these games at any time, completely trashing billions of dollars in virtual investments. That's really what's wrong here.
If you want to make a real difference, start a campaign to get national legislation passed regarding the legal rights of digital citizens, the money we pay for creating and outfitting our virtual characters, and the many hours we put into creating them. |
Secondly there's the issue that laws would only apply to companies in the country of origin. If (for example) the US passed such laws companies like NCSoft would be pretty easily able to avoid them because they aren't located in the US. Even if players were in the US the company could probably have their business offices in another country and avoid technically doing business in the US.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
This made me chuckle but only because I'm a damned cynic as well.
I've found that all the SaveCoH stuff, while well meant, has already died. Our game is already on life support and the plug is being pulled in one month. While it was nice to hear that    was kicked to the curb, by the time any emulator hits it will be far too late to get any traction beyond with a handful of nostalgia lovers.Everything dies. Sometimes before they should, sometimes not nearly damn soon enough. I've loved this game. I'm sad to see it die but you can't have life without death. |
Now see....THIS is a post that isn't trollish. It isn't condemning, nor sarcastic....nor does it reek of someone trying to earn their paycheck from NCSoft. Kudos, Bill.
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Welcome to the Internet!
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Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
The same people are making the same negative, off-topic posts again and again, just like they do in every thread.
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good point.
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Originally Posted by Zem
You can't honestly say you had any reasonable expectation to "own" these items outside the game in which they exist nor that the game would exist forever. Who then is really to blame for the money you spent on them, knowing that they were temporary? |
-Female Player-
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words.
"Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard.  Never change, E_L! |
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You're welcome. And ncsoft can go EABOD.
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Originally Posted by mercykilling
Now see....THIS is a post that isn't trollish. It isn't condemning, nor sarcastic....nor does it reek of someone trying to earn their paycheck from NCSoft. Kudos, Bill.
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Be well, people of CoH.
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They would be forced to have an offline version off that game. There is plenty of console games that when the servers shut down you still have the offline version most the time of which online stuff(loot,costumes etc) carry over to.
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Originally Posted by Zem
And what exactly would you do about in-game virtual goods once a game is closed? And mind you, it has to be something that doesn't prevent companies from wanting to do business at all. Therefore, you can't write laws that force them to keep games open forever or to refund all virtual purchases when the game closes. Or rather, you could, but then game companies simply wouldn't make these games in the first place. Not where these laws exist anyway.
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I wouldn't be against the idea of an offline mode but the relevant question is, "Why should they be forced to provide one?" In a competitive market like this, shouldn't this be something that is driven by consumer demand rather than legislation?
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Originally Posted by Lucky666
They would be forced to have an offline version off that game. There is plenty of console games that when the servers shut down you still have the offline version most the time of which online stuff(loot,costumes etc) carry over to.
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They shouldn't be forced to legally, but the presumption is that consumers have the ability to reward and punish desirable and undesirable behavior. So people saying its childish to "bad-mouth" NCsoft or boycott their products are denigrating the only feedback paths consumers have in this situation to exercise the rights the free market presumes them to have.|
Originally Posted by Zem
I wouldn't be against the idea of an offline mode but the relevant question is, "Why should they be forced to provide one?" In a competitive market like this, shouldn't this be something that is driven by consumer demand rather than legislation?
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Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong.
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Heh, out a few days and interesting news happens...i need to be out more often. I know the thread has veered off a bit and this response is out of step from the current line of discussion but it's part of the OP so i think it's ok to revisit.|
Originally Posted by Talionis
...Positron takes the time to tell us that CoH is the largest MMO ever killed. Take that air in a second... Positron, who is in the industry, says that CoH is the most healthy MMO ever killed.
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Not sure if Positron meant it that way or not but the way you paraphrased it, might be altering the meaning a bit.
Largest playerbase among the defunct MMOs is not quite the same connotation as "most healthy mmo" although it's close. I suppose prior to CoX, SWG may have been considered to be the largest mmo among the shuttered ones at the time...or close to TR. Not sure, TR as Gangrel guessed could be about 37k subscribers but SWG is not known. Sony doesn't itemize their game revenue in their reports that i saw.
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On another note, that interview brought up something not mentioned in the thread yet but could be another hint for us about their cost.
Their discussion turned to kickstarters in general, but then later Positron commented this:
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118:53 If paragon studios have a crazy kickstarter, we're talking like half a million at least! 119:19 That would be enough to..ah...to continue development for a certain period of time...ah...and, hopefully to attract some angel investors, attract some venture capital...ah, in there. |
Could that mean that somewhere between $500 - $1 mil would be what's needed to run Paragon for at least 1 month with most if not all of the 80 staff they had?
Any number crunchers around?
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A million dollars would probably have bought you about one major Issue.
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Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
Could that mean that somewhere between $500 - $1 mil would be what's needed to run Paragon for at least 1 month with most if not all of the 80 staff they had?
Any number crunchers around? |
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Indeed, those people are dead wrong. If a company didn't want my vociferous ire after making a change I didn't like, then they should have never solicited my interest in the first place.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong.
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Don't suppose you can break that down a bit with more detail...or equate that to a monthly cost figure would be easier to relate to.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
A million dollars would probably have bought you about one major Issue.
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My usual calculation is (Σ(Yearly Salaries * 2)) * Number of employees * Length of development in years
Multiplying everyone's salary by two allows you to cover the additional expenses of operation, although this might only apply to single player games.
Hmm, well even if that can be used for mmo development, not sure we can apply that to the hint given about $500k minimum for a certain period. We're not sure of their yearly salaries, how long that "period" is and even if Positron meant all of the 80 employees or a partial crew.
Does that clue get us any closer to figuring out their monthly/quarterly cost?
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Always good to meet another cynic (although at times I tend to veer into outright misanthropy). Perhaps we'll meet again. I'm heading over to CO for my superhero fix (since now with CoH gone, it'll be the only superhero MMORPG on the market worth a damn).|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
This made me chuckle but only because I'm a damned cynic as well.
I've found that all the SaveCoH stuff, while well meant, has already died. Our game is already on life support and the plug is being pulled in one month. While it was nice to hear that was kicked to the curb, by the time any emulator hits it will be far too late to get any traction beyond with a handful of nostalgia lovers.Everything dies. Sometimes before they should, sometimes not nearly damn soon enough. I've loved this game. I'm sad to see it die but you can't have life without death. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They shouldn't be forced to legally, but the presumption is that consumers have the ability to reward and punish desirable and undesirable behavior. So people saying its childish to "bad-mouth" NCsoft or boycott their products are denigrating the only feedback paths consumers have in this situation to exercise the rights the free market presumes them to have.
Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong. |
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Arcanaville, why are you right so often?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They shouldn't be forced to legally, but the presumption is that consumers have the ability to reward and punish desirable and undesirable behavior. So people saying its childish to "bad-mouth" NCsoft or boycott their products are denigrating the only feedback paths consumers have in this situation to exercise the rights the free market presumes them to have.
Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong. |
Culex's resistance guide
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Little known fact: I am Arcanaville's head writer.|
Originally Posted by Pitho
Arcanaville, why are you right so often?
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Fortunately, what I write is on the back of her head, so everything that she types come from herself.
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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My best estimates and best information converge on it costing about a million dollars a quarter to operate the game and maintain the CoH development team, plus or minus about 25%. This does not include the costs of maintaining the Paragon dev team working on Project 2, although that's not trivial to arbitrarily disentangle.|
Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
Don't suppose you can break that down a bit with more detail...or equate that to a monthly cost figure would be easier to relate to.
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I should also point out that Matt's off-handed statement seems to imply that Paragon Studios was most definitely burning through more than half a million a quarter ($2M/yr) but probably not burning through more than half a million every month** ($6M). That entire range of values would make City of Heroes profitable, and my best estimate lands approximately in the center of that range.
** That number isn't arbitrary. You can certainly do a deal in a month, but not likely one of this scale in a week. Matt's comment implies $500k will therefore last more than a week, but it could last only a month. And most people doing rough guestimates in their head round off to simple time windows, as opposed to thinking about how much three weeks would cost, say.
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Hmm, i would've thought that posi hint would get more bites. Well, while waiting for someone else to post more info, i've been doing some digging and found this:
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Not sure how accurate that $10k/mo/person figure is, but if applied to the 80 people that was at Paragon, that would be about $800k/mo in average personnel expenses. So it might be possible Positron meant $500k minimum in a month.| A typical small- to mid-sized game studio consists of 15–30 people. At an average monthly burn rate of $10,000 per person, that puts the personnel expenses between $150,000 and $300,000 per month. |
So possibly, their quarterly cost could be from $1.5mil ($500k/mo) to $2.4mil ($800k/mo)...does that sound right to anyone else?
[Edit]
If that is anywhere close to true, using CoX's last quarter revenue (2Q12) of $2,469,437...a possible ballpark guesstimate for CoX's profit could be from $23k/mo to $323k/mo.
[/Edit]
EDIT: Just saw your reply Arcana, thanks for that. What about the $10k/mo/person statement from the link above. The author appears to be an app developer so not sure about his knowledge of MMO dev studios, but does that sound reasonable?
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Then it's good I wasn't saying anything of the sort, isn't it? The only point I was making in my reply was that what we don't need is legislation that could do more harm than good when this is the sort of thing that can be handled by consumer actions, whether those are buying decisions or merely attempts to generate bad publicity. If there are enough upset people to tarnish the company's brand via protests then that brand deserves to be tarnished.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong.
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Yeah the last thing we need is MORE legislation. I knew my paragon point purchases were only useful as long as the game was running...I don't need some law to "protect" me because I am an adult and quite capable of making a rational financial decision regarding virtual goods.
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Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I love you, I Burnt the Toast!
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Originally Posted by Zem
Then it's good I wasn't saying anything of the sort, isn't it? The only point I was making in my reply was that what we don't need is legislation that could do more harm than good when this is the sort of thing that can be handled by consumer actions, whether those are buying decisions or merely attempts to generate bad publicity. If there are enough upset people to tarnish the company's brand via protests then that brand deserves to be tarnished.
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While a law to do that sounds like a nice idea, it wont be in practice. You think games now are trying to be WoW or WoW is the only one of it's kind? With that law, Game makers will take their buisness elsewhere, stop maling games for here or build games that are imatation of the most successful one to minimize risks.
They wont come up with risky ideas with laws that make those ideas not even worth the risk.
If a law like that existed prior to COX, then I can bet that COX would have never existed and instead of been a reskinned WoW grind fest.
-Female Player-
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words.
"Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L! |
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Jesus christ you make it sound like making game developers have offline servers would be the end of online video games as we know it, hyperbole much?|
Originally Posted by Evil_Legacy
While a law to do that sounds like a nice idea, it wont be in practice. You think games now are trying to be WoW or WoW is the only one of it's kind? With that law, Game makers will take their buisness elsewhere, stop maling games for here or build games that are imatation of the most successful one to minimize risks.
They wont come up with risky ideas with laws that make those ideas not even worth the risk. If a law like that existed prior to COX, then I can bet that COX would have never existed and instead of been a reskinned WoW grind fest. |
Sorry but selling something to someone one day then taking it away the next cause it's digital and your EULA BS said you could should be criminal and I hope one day it is.
Nothing makes me feel better.
This made me chuckle but only because I'm a damned cynic as well.
I've found that all the SaveCoH stuff, while well meant, has already died. Our game is already on life support and the plug is being pulled in one month.
While it was nice to hear that
Everything dies. Sometimes before they should, sometimes not nearly damn soon enough. I've loved this game. I'm sad to see it die but you can't have life without death.
Be well, people of CoH.