Also noteworthy, they shit-canned Dungeon Runners (free to play Diablo-esque game), it's been a while and I may be mistaken.. but there was as I recall maybe a couple weeks notice, everyone got premium accounts for the duration.. don't know if there was any form of refund though.
Wasn't NCSoft also responsible for Auto Assault?
Dungeon Runners was behind the scenes in trouble for a long time and the team was vocal about that at the end. From NCSoft's end of things, planning for that shutdown was easy in the timeframe considered, as well as the low player numbers involved.
From Wikipedia - - "Dungeon Runners just isn't cutting the mustard," Nichols said on an announcement on the Dungeon Runners forum. "If she were a ship, she'd be taking on water. Yeah, she's been taking on water for a long time now. Are my cryptic references too hard to decipher? The game just isn't profitable. And, the first rule of business is to be profitable!"
Unlike Tabula Rasa and COH, there weren't enough players to make it work. Sunsetting that title was probably long in consideration.
As for Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriot claimed that NCSoft forced him out and planned on the closure of the game well before the spaceflight he was planning to take in 2008, with the dev team posting while he was in space in November that the title was going end of life in February 2009. He later sued NCSoft for $24 million for wrongful termination and won in 2010. (Naturally, NCSoft appealed, and after missteps, the amount rose to $32 million a year later from interest and legal fees.) Still, the team had a sunset plan, and made an end-of-the-world scenario for the last day of in-game play.
From those cancellations for titles that never had a popular foothold or return on investment, it's appalling that NCSoft treats the City of Heroes end-of-life period as "After eight years of operations, we're just shutting it off in three months. Thanks for playing." Nothing in the time since June when NCSoft was hinting towards trouble has shown any consideration or deliberate thought put into things considering our termination, except the financial end of things: the layoff, and the in-game freeze of purchases and subscriptions. That's about it. Everything about this reads as hasty and just plain slapdash.
