But the Paragon Studios team, all of them, were surprised by the closing. If there were targets to hit, they were never told about them. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Every company I've known to be closed through not hitting its targets is surprised they were not given an extension, or more understanding. Every single one. Or they say the targets were not realistic, or some other reason why they thought that they'd be the exception. But as I say, its a hard rule that protects the professional gambler - there are no exceptions.
We
know that time and again City was supposed to be revitalised and turned around.
CoV for instance was supposed to bring in a whole new mass of players, almost doubling the player base by adding in villains and pvp to draw in new customers the game had not attracted before. It most definitely failed to hit the performance it had promised, and instead, split the existing playerbase, such that each side seemed a bit less populated than before, and starting the disatisfaction about how hard it could be to find redside teams.
Of course, that was all under Cryptic, so lets look at ... Going Rogue. Yeah, that hit all its targets didn't it?
Closing the French and German language support seem like a target in the original plan? A sign of success? How about closing the Offices in the UK for Europe?
Plans are usually about either growth, or milking cash during a sunset period. City was not growing, so anything in that plan of five years about growth was not being hit. Yes, the Market brought in extra revenue ... but did it take the income back to CoH's strongest point of subs? Did it undo 5 years of declining player numbers?
We
know, and have known for some years, that CoH has never been close to attaining what it had
hoped to. We just don't know how many of those hopes were actually the basis of financial performance targets. The only persons who could tell us would be the head of Paragon Studios and the CFO there.
Again, I'm not putting thise forward as anything but an example that one doesn't have to get into conspiracy theories to speculate. Occam's Razor will always say that failure to hit performance targets for Growth (and the game was shrinking, not growing) is alone enough reason to close many businesses.
The bottom line is still the same, it was profitable, but not profitable enough to run, but the current thinking on the value of the property is higher than anyone has come close to bidding. Those are facts, and all else is speculation, which barring insider financial reports and reading contracts, are just blind guesses.
We should spend most of our time working on changing the valuations of what it is worth to sell, and what it is costing to keep closed, rather than on speculation and guesswork that we can never prove, and doesn't change the underlying need of what we must do.