You know, a rather paranoid thought occurred to me just the other day.
Nothing that NCSoft has done makes business sense regarding CoH. They say they are killing it as part of "a strategic realignment" to focus on the asian market, and then turn around and get right into bed with the west less than a year later. They say they tried to sell it, but then later come out and say nothing has been decided. They kill the project and then don't reassign any of the assets, including 80 odd talented designers who could at the very least have done remote work on their other games for them. they divest themselves of any money they could have made on the IP or the engine by re-purposing it... but then, are completely uninterested in even making fast cash on the sale of those assets.
It seems like the text book on what NOT to do in big business, even using the sociopathic mindset that big business often uses.
then I thought... who stood to lose money on City of Heroes continuing? Certainly not NCSoft. it was alone in their catalogue as a super-hero MMO. It would not have competed with any of their other products as it attracted an entirely different audience than lineage, guild wars, etc. Nieither would it have been a threat to existing MMO titles, other than Champions, which was already a second class citizen in the MMO world, lagging behind even NC Soft and definitely not even on the same planet as Blizzard.
BUT. DC and Marvel. or more properly,
Warner Brothers and
Disney. At the time of the closing of City, both had plans to launch or retool their super-MMOs.
Suddenly it all made perfect sense. The silence. The refusal to discuss or negotiate with the community. The doubletalk about what was or was not done regading the game's future. The sudden reversal on the decision to take Paragon Studios independent.
If the decision wasn't about whether or not City's assets could be better utilized elsewhere, and it wasn't about getting out of the western MMO arena all together... what if it was all about taking a fall? What if Blizzard, or Warner, or Disney heard that NCSoft was considering divesting Paragon Studios, and then said
"Hey, if you kill it outright we'll slide you a not-inconsiderable amount of money under the table." Then NCSoft gets a fast infusion of cash, and whichever company made the offer sees its largest competitor in the super-MMO genre just evaporate. Even if it wasn't done as a company decision, but just paying off one or two executives to be obstructionist to any such deals to sell off paragon...
how many of us have tried, or outright transferred to Champions, Marvel Online or DCUO? think about the swell in eyeball traffic and actual money those three games enjoyed in the year since Paragon closed. even if its only for one month, and even if its only freebie players, it's still "new user traffic" that can be counted on the books.
Sure it all sounds paranoid, but it also makes a hell of a lot of business sense compared to the theory that it was just a long series of bad business decisions and ass-covering.