An Update

Blaming advertising is convenient, but it's a red herring. There was advertising for Going Rogue. There was advertising for Freedom. If it brought in new users, the product was unable to retain them. That's on the product, not a lack of advertising.

She, and hey: I'm on Golden and E-K's side here! Find your own example!

MA powers aren't fatal

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I think it's an important distinction if you want to buy a game studio, and are trying to determine the value of that studio. If you're having a discussion on a gaming forum? Not so much. I don't try to correct every mistake I see on the internet. Also, sometimes I just like to enjoy my popcorn.

*edit* Geez, you guys type quickly.

We could also say that since NCSoft killed off the EU side of their offices that it was an early sign for the game...

I know many people over here in the UK who *love* super hero games, but due to a general lack of advertising budget for EU side, we never really saw hide nor hair of any advertising for *any* of NCsoft games past their 3/6 months launch window.

Now, I do also remember CoX being on a few coverdisks back in 2008 (ish) over here... but that was just a couple of magazines doing it as a once off...

Wish it happened more, but as PC gaming magazines became harder to come by, and one closing a couple of years ago, it looked bad for PC gaming.

Now with everything being more and more online, I was (to be honest) generally surprised with the general lack of coverage for CoX... there are exceptions, but it was still few and far between.

That's because we don't have buttery fingers. Yet.

I just think if people are going to be enraged to the point of spending a good portion of their time vandalizing webpages, they should be enraged for the right reasons.

So your position is now that it wasn't healthy but that was because it had no advertising budget ?

Interesting. Advertising to the public is something I never was able to get a good grasp of. Marketing in general is one of the most difficult parts of any business because of the difficulty in assessing the results. Here is something I was really aware of though. My best sales came from repeat business and my best markets were prior customers that I could interest in new/improved products.

CoH was unable to seal the deal with its former customers. Look at that graph at best they came back briefly and left.

This leaves you with the proposition

1. Paragon studios can't interest the people who are most likely to buy their products and can be reached with inexpensive advertising.

2. If you can't sell to the market most likely to buy should you spend large amounts of money to reach other markets much less likely to purchase ?

3. How far do you trust people with a record of not delivering ?

A friend that I went to university ended up being the editor of one of the UK PC gaming magazines that closed down.

I feel kinda glad that I turned down the "Eve Online reporter" job request from him, because I saw even then that PC magazines were becoming filled up with more and more advertisments (actual ads for PC gear and games), and less "reviewing games/hardware/tips/letters etc etc".

One of the last magazines I bought was 120ish pages long, and 1/2 of that was advertisments. There were only about 10 pages of PC reviews (15ish games), and another 20 for PC "upcoming games" (only 10 games).

And that was start of 2011.

I'm shocked that anyone accepts SaveCoX members as credible sources, given how it wouldn't be the first time they have presented wild rumor as fact or been proven wrong on other occasions while claiming reliable inside information (unless, for example, these forums really were closed down on Sept 1st and this is all a dream).

Do I think we're dealing with bad people? Do I think they are incompetent? Do I think they are deliberately misleading others? No to all three. I do however, believe that they are too emotionally invested in the SaveCoX movement to provide reliable, unbiased information. Any potentially positive rumor is spun into unquestioned fact and proof that victory is just around the corner, while any communication from the company becomes 'more NCSoft lies'. The way they discuss NCSoft makes it appear they have humanized a corporation, which made a standard corporate decision, into a personal nemesis with an agenda to persecute them.

I wish the SaveCoX movement had had more objective spokespeople from the beginning. I wish the SaveCoX movement was a lot less prone to histrionics. Posts like "I feel petty, but..." "Are NCSoft really so ignorant?" and reply after reply about how they are 'really going to stick it to NCSoft on the Dec 1st' do nothing but erode credibility. Even posts like "NCSoft not talking to us and shutting down the game on the 30th is GOOD NEWS! It means we're close to victory!" smack of nothing but pure desperation.

In short, I wish that when the SaveCoX spokespersons, official or otherwise, made an announcement, they hadn't previously made it all but impossible for me to take them at face value. It is disappointing that now I am more likely to believe the opposite until unbiased 3rd party corroboration can be provided.

Mostly, if I'm honest with myself, I'm just tired of the rhetoric. The game I made, and continued, friendships in for 8+ years ended on Aug 31st, and no matter what happens in the future, no matter what the SaveCoX movement says or does, that City of Heroes will never come back.

My position is that the game was healthy because it was quite probably profitable. Now, some might call it unhealthy because it wasn't profitable *enough,* but that's splitting hairs. There are plenty of possible reasons why the game had diminishing revenue, one of the big ones would be the wholesale financial crisis of the past few years, as that has had an effect on everyone.

One's best sales are always from repeat customers, that much is true. That fact lead to the development of a multi-billion dollar CRM industry, after all. I perceive the problem faced by Paragon as being three fold:

1) Sudden drop in the availability of disposable income to throw towards frivolous expenses, of which gaming would be one.

2) Minimal involvement from the parent company (NCSoft) in regards to advertising and marketing support.

3) The game's actual age. People's attention spans are a lot shorter than they used to be, so we largely all prefer the newer, shinier stuff.

At this point, the best way to save City of Heroes, should someone obtain the entire IP, is start on CoH2 immediately.

Everything points to paragon studios as an entity not being profitable. The fact the game wasn't making enough money to be worth breaking it out as its own entity defines unhealthy.

Just because you are still drawing breath doesn't make you healthy.

You'll forgive my skepticism that what you are saying regarding Paragon Studios is in fact true, as if they were not being profitable, I suspect we would certainly have seen evidence of that before August 31st.

Well, there was that whole 'Freedom' initiative. It's pretty widely accepted in the industry that subscription games don't go F2P unless they have to.

You did. It is as simple as computing the cost of running a studio with 80 people, + cost of hosting, billing, and providing support GMs for the game. You just chose not to accept the facts

That's pretty much changed now - the TORtanic is possibly the last major sub-only game, unless Blizzard take a chance with their established player base and go for a sub-only model for their next MMO.

I don't want to sound mean, but try learning about the industry you're commenting on before making such statements and you'll look a less foolish.

Virtually every traditional MMO in existence aside from a few notables would kill for those charts. "Surge and decline" is about the most common business model that there ever was for MMO's before and after the beast-that-was-wow. Very few MMO's see gradual growth over time. Very few are designed or budgeted with it in mind.

They budget with the knowledge that many people consume games and move on to the next shiny. You need the "surge" at the start to be big enough to pay for the years of development time, then you budget the rest of development based on the expectation of gradual decline accented by occasional releases of new content to briefly bring people back.

Gamers are fickle. There are plenty of options out there. People buy console games that have under 20 hours of playable content and are ready to try something new. Most don't turn a single game into the core of their personal recreation- but they'll come and try for a while. Back when CoH was designed, 3 months was the expected "churn rate" for MMO business models- you've got your average player for 3 months. CoH was notable and recognized by industry insiders for retaining players LONGER than the industry standard-- not by a few days or weeks, but MONTHS.

Many game companies have stopped reporting individual game revenue in their reports specifically to avoid the "lemming approach" where a decline in subscribers leads to more crying doom... or they change what they measure over time to conceal drops. Very few companies have the transparency we've seen here with the info we can draw from the NCSoft reports and part of that is because there's very little to be ashamed over when it comes to CoH.

That chart that you're using as "evidence" of an unhealthy game has been used by people within the industry as the hallmark of a solid performer remaining sustainable and stable much longer than many of its compatriots.

That's interesting, considering that there are a games that have launched as F2P and have done extremely well with it -League of Legends, for example.

Widely accepted knowledge may well be incorrect, after all.

I'm also extremely familiar with accounting slight of hand, and am not fully convinced that it is not in play here.

I will sound mean. You're full of crap. While most MMO's have surge and decline almost all of them manage to surge for more than 1 quarter at a time. Even MMOs considered to be failures have managed to do better than that