NC Soft is definitely interested in selling the IP. Otherwise they would have said no right from the start.
They are willing to sell the disk image for I23. What they are not willing to sell is the source code. This is
due to security issues with the COH source code and other NC Soft games that
use the same launcher and account management. Sitting on a 12 year old IP makes
them zero money. Better to sell it and make some cash. However a million bucks for
said IP and disk image is not a lot of money to a big company. A million dollars being a rough
guesstimate. They are doing due diligence so that this "deal" does not turn around
and bite them. So patience people. Stop discouraging everyone with your doubts.
Lets just wait and see what happens.
The point comes up is that if they are worried about selling the source code because of proprietary stuff in it that they use for their online shop ETC. then by all means I say we pay them to remove those from the source and hand us the source minus those references. I mean what's it gonna cost another 50 grand to have one internal employee remove those references in the code?
I suspect I'm not the only one who thought of this, and I'm sure it's probably a discussion point of Nate and crew. and possibly one of the reasons it's taking so long. they may have already agreed to such a thing and have someone internally doing it, of course it could take months to make sure all references to such proprietary things in the code have been removed before the deal can be finalized. and until it's finalized the NDA is still in effect.
Whatever the reason is why it is taking so long I'm sure it's perfectly valid. we've waited 2 years, whats another 6 months especially with a deal that is already in the working and has had only positive feedback. (lets face it, if there was significantly negative feedback Nate and crew would violate the NDA to tell us as it would be a deal breaker.) No deal breaker? that's good enough for me.
As far as I understand, the deal was some other company runs City of Heroes in permanent issue 23, they take as much money as they need to run the servers, and the rest goes to ncsoft.
No, NCSoft started the intermediate company for the transfer of the IP. Most likely because of something like I posted above, something had to be digitally prepared before it could be handed to nate and crew, obviously the disk image isn't going to make itself. and it can't be exactly like it was when it shutdown because that includes a link to NCSoft's online store which will not be included in this version, or will be redirected to nate and crew's own business account.
NCSoft is actually selling the IP just not in entirety, some of the code is to be excluded, but what NCSoft does sell they will no longer be making profits from unless otherwise specified in the deal as a selling perk, like "we'll continue to share [%] profits with you for [number of years] after the sale."
so how does this intermediate company get paid? they are getting paid upfront, /NOW/, their services are being rendered on the game and most likely that is what we are waiting on. I expect NCSoft is urging said team to hurry up, but things can only be done so fast to remove code and fix the bugs it causes.
This next version for example will most likely reverse the mandatory NCSoft launcher and provide one last update sending the old style installer to everyone then 86ing coh from the NCSoft launcher some months later. Which may be the end of NCSoft's profits from the game.
these are just speculations, but they are based on info we already know. agian the company NCSoft set-up is a temporary transfer company.