Here's the thing about stocks. Some go up, some go down and some stay the same.
NCSoft shut down CoH, even though it was making money.
Why? We may never know the specifics. It's probably the single largest reason why the closure has felt so negative to many CoH players.
My hunch is that it was a combination of factors.
First, CoH was easily considered a "western" game. In the "west", the economy was(and still is) in decline. Even though the game was a measly 15 bucks a month, when times are hard, something has to give. If memory serves, the dollar was and still is weaker that it used to be.
When a foreign company gets 100 US dollars converted to the Korean Won, the strength of the dollar is a significant detail to consider. That 2% of total revenue that NCSoft got was worth less than it was previously. (It was 2%, wasn't it?)
Secondly, although from my seat, keeping a functioning, profitable company going makes sense to me, that doesn't mean I have all the information to make the fiscally responsible decision. It's possible that NCSoft simply isn't concerned with niche marketing. And that's what a super-hero MMO is - a niche. Why? because as delightful as the costume creator and the rest of CoH was, it didn't have as broad an appeal as WoW and other games. Given the market for MMO players, CoH never did have a super-robust playerbase number wise. I suspect if the PvP changes in issue 13 were addressed in grand fashion, perhaps CoH could have kept a lot of players that left, and possibly attract more once they went F2P. Still, there were a host of expenses and costs that went into running CoH. Without all that information at my fingertips, I honestly can't say that NCSoft did the wrong thing, from a fiscal perspective.
What I can say is that if I had been the decision maker, even if the game were losing a small amount of money per year, if I were aware of how tremendous the impact CoH had on the lives of many of its players, I'd have kept the game going and used the losses to offset the income from the other games to lower my tax liability.
But, I'm in the US and have no idea if Korea even has a tax code, let alone what it is regarding losses. And there again, that's the rub. Many of us don't know the business climate in Korea, so most of us really can't know if NCSoft acted responsibly or not. My guess is that they aren't in the business of losing money. They probably closed the game down to make things simpler(cheaper) for them in some vague, nebulous way.
