Titan Network
Graveyard => Save Paragon Retirees => Save Paragon City! => Topic started by: Ironwolf on October 10, 2012, 01:28:19 AM
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I know this is from a purely capitalistic viewpoint, but I do work for a very large corporation and so am familiar with how they work.
If you buy the IP now or attempt to do so while it has not been written off - NCSoft MUST charge a great deal and likely more than it is realistically worth in order to pay the taxes on the capital gains and to lose out on the tax breaks.
If you wait a quarter or at most a tax year the write off will be over and the company will likely be far more open for a sale. Then it may even be up for a fire sale price. I also think other companies may have similar thoughts. You have a proven product that could be restored in a similar vein to those at Good Old Games.
I know from our stand point we are negotiating from a position of weakness. NCSoft holds all the cards and has benefits in NOT selling. Once those are complete - they are at the weaker end and the purchase price goes down. From a business view alone it is in all of our best interest to wait.
Emotionally likely not so much and I really dread December 1st. But taking a step back and looking at the game as a business, this is the wiser course.
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I am not 100% so don't quote me on it but I believe TonyV said he has plans to keep talking with NCSoft after the servers go dark and the IP looses value as well. You make excellent points though I just hope that if we do, lets say, purchase the game a year from now we will still have the player base to fill the servers. Although I guess the rebirth of City of Heroes would probably be an epic announcement at anytime.
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I am not 100% so don't quote me on it but I believe TonyV said he has plans to keep talking with NCSoft after the servers go dark and the IP looses value as well.
Of course, talking with is entirely different from talking to - or, more accurately, talking at - NCsoft. In order to talk with them, information has to flow bi-directionally.
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I agree. It is economically valid to wait to buy the IP, because the moment the servers go dark it's value will depreciate faster than a new car. But this is assuming it's worth the loss in the playerbase, which is something we can't account for with perfect, or even good, accuracy.
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Well you have two different situations, depending on who is attempting to do the buy out.
Assume that it is formerly-known-as-Paragon. They need something up and running within days (or a couple weeks at worst) after the servers go dark so they have a cash inflow to keep the new studio going. Any loss in player base is going to be bad.
Assume that it is...oh, for the sake of argument, Valve. They can afford to sit back and wait for January 1 as the value of the IP sinks faster than the Hindenburg. They already have a cash-rich and thriving business, and solid advertising budgets, so they could, conceivably, weather the loss of the player base entirely and just do a cold reboot.
A crowd-funded purchase of the IP would be better off waiting as the value degrades, but would run into a mass quantity of other problems other people have already described far better than I could.
I suppose we will know more after Nov 2, when the gag-orders come off Positron et al, what formerly-known-as-Paragon thinks they can do.
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So, I guess, a hopeful scenario is that Valve buys it in January, the hires what remains of Paragon?
Would be nice, if the folks at Paragon aren't themselves in the dark because they can't pay their electricity bills.
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So, I guess, a hopeful scenario is that Valve buys it in January, the hires what remains of Paragon?
Would be nice, if the folks at Paragon aren't themselves in the dark because they can't pay their electricity bills.
Amen to that.
This does assume that NCSoft is willing to turn loose at all. The only case I know of, for sure, where someone tried to pry an IP out of their claws after it was dead was Tabula Rasa. I have no idea how much of that was pure spite on their part and how much was company policy of never letting go of an IP.
It's a damn shame that this doesn't work the way book contracts do. Book contracts specify that X amount of time after a book is out of print, the rights to reassign go back to the copyright holder (the author). This is called "having the rights revert." If the rights to a game IP were written into contracts to revert, I bet we'd see NCSoft keeping at least one server live...and we'd have somewhere to go while Formerly got a new game together, or Plan Z finally became IP-Z or both.
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If I'm reading OP correctly, doesn't that also imply that by fighting, we actually HURT PS's chances at negotiating a sale, by making the demand for the IP more noticable?
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Of course, talking with is entirely different from talking to - or, more accurately, talking at - NCsoft. In order to talk with them, information has to flow bi-directionally.
undisputable logic is undisputable
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Tim, your observation is a genuine concern, however, without more information, keeping active is better than going silent and breaking up, because it is a slim chance that the OP is right. It's not a bad analysis, but it's only one of many possibilities.
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Of course, talking with is entirely different from talking to - or, more accurately, talking at - NCsoft. In order to talk with them, information has to flow bi-directionally.
Lol very valid point
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OK, now here is something to remember.
We are not the ones negotiating for the sale of the IP. Short of crowdfunding about 5 mill, we aren't going to be, I don't think.
Let us assume at this point that someone out there is. We know that Formerly is. There might be others.
This forms the classic two-pronged carrot-and-stick, or good-cop bad-cop approach.
While the other party or parties hold out the carrot, we keep beating NCSoftcore with the stick. The hope being that NCSoftcore will either move away from the stick, or towards the carrot, or both, but at least there will be some movement.
Does that make as much sense to you guys as it does to me?
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It does. At this point I don't see us having much of a carrot to use; but I think properly applied we have been and can continue to be a far nastier stick than NCSoft ever expected.
I need to spend more time checking things here, I've let myself get distracted by the message last week. I need to figure out what I can personally contribute to the stick right now...
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The only case I know of, for sure, where someone tried to pry an IP out of their claws after it was dead was Tabula Rasa. I have no idea how much of that was pure spite on their part and how much was company policy of never letting go of an IP.
NetDevil tried to get the rights to Auto Assault back after NCSoft shut that game down but they "couldn't come to an agreement." Here's the interview where Scott Brown said that:
http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/interviews/4745-Auto-Assault-NetDevil-Reacts-to-Closure-Exclusive-Interview-with-Scott-Brown
Here's an interview with Scott Brown about NCSoft's closure of AutoAssault. It talks briefly about the disagreement between the studio and the publisher about keeping the game going with a smaller team vs. shutting down altogether:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51644
It should be noted that Auto Assault's "Save AA" petition got a few hundred signatures compared to our almost 21,000.
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NetDevil tried to get the rights to Auto Assault back after NCSoft shut that game down but they "couldn't come to an agreement." Here's the interview where Scott Brown said that:
http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/interviews/4745-Auto-Assault-NetDevil-Reacts-to-Closure-Exclusive-Interview-with-Scott-Brown
Here's an interview with Scott Brown about NCSoft's closure of AutoAssault. It talks briefly about the disagreement between the studio and the publisher about keeping the game going with a smaller team vs. shutting down altogether:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51644
It should be noted that Auto Assault's "Save AA" petition got a few hundred signatures compared to our almost 21,000.
Out of curiosity, did they keep trying to get it after game shutdown, and if so, how long did they keep trying?
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Would be nice, if the folks at Paragon aren't themselves in the dark because they can't pay their electricity bills.
On the bright side, I don't think that'll happen - they are all talented people with good references, and NCSoft itself was helping them get new jobs if what I've heard was correct.
Of course you can also see the downside there... if it takes too long there won't be a "Formerly", they'll all be scattered around the game industry doing new things. (or if we're REALLY lucky someone will pick them up with an eye set on acquiring the IP or filling the void with a spiritual successor, knowing how CoH still managed to stay the number one Super Hero game despite the appearance of younger rivals.)
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Yes, please understand I am not saying I want to be out on the street unable to play the game on December 1 or the folks who lost jobs to be out.
I was just pointing out from a strictly business viewpoint why some other investors may be reluctant to approach NCSoft at this point. We are making noise which is good. We show any buyer out there that a strong base still exists. If they buy the game and pop up 2 servers they will have a fairly cheap game to work with and start making some money.
If they actually advertised - they could show how the new City lives again and get some folks on board.
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Yes, please understand I am not saying I want to be out on the street unable to play the game on December 1 or the folks who lost jobs to be out.
I was just pointing out from a strictly business viewpoint why some other investors may be reluctant to approach NCSoft at this point. We are making noise which is good. We show any buyer out there that a strong base still exists. If they buy the game and pop up 2 servers they will have a fairly cheap game to work with and start making some money.
If they actually advertised - they could show how the new City lives again and get some folks on board.
Don't worry. I don't think anyone is hating on you at all. You make a perfectly valid point and one that needs to be considered.
If we as a community stay together and focussed, even AFTER the servers close, then we prove to any potential buyer/investor that the game IP has value because we'll come back to a revived version of it.
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I'm going to say it. I have to. Part of me has been thinking the unthinkable myself, although for very different reasons (namely, I think the Who Will Die story arc was handled very badly, which causes me to worry if the dev team may have been running out of ideas). :(
Now go ahead and burn me at the stake. Only part of me believes this, but...
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Issue 24 ssays you are wrong on that.
The Who will die arc is in no way worse than the entire Praetorian zone.
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I don't disagree, but my feeling was more one of pressure. After the change to F2P, there were a couple of things that were put out that really felt like they were the product of a deadline, more than a creative process. I don't think they were substandard, just forced, like they were required to put something out every month, so things that wouldn't normally make it out of brainstorming sessions were getting developed.
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I don't disagree, but my feeling was more one of pressure. After the change to F2P, there were a couple of things that were put out that really felt like they were the product of a deadline, more than a creative process. I don't think they were substandard, just forced, like they were required to put something out every month, so things that wouldn't normally make it out of brainstorming sessions were getting developed.
That could be. In that case, what they should have done was revisit old special events that came out occasionally. But the Who Will Die arcs, as well as Praetoria, are unavailable to non VIP-subscribers...
The Who will die arc is in no way worse than the entire Praetorian zone.
I'm not sure what you mean here; I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. I, as usual, am very story-focused, so my first and foremost reasons for disliking the Who Will Die arc is for story reasons. Namely, I felt that Statesman's death was anticlimactic (because States is linked by fate to Recluse, and his death has nothing to do with/no discernable effect that I know of on Recluse), and I felt that Psyche's death made Manticore go back to being too much like Batman, whereas beforehand there was one, obvious, major difference between the two (namely, Manticore being married). I can think of a variety of different ways that each of them could have been done better.
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Netdevil was bought by Gazillion Entertainment in July 2008 (the same company who are doing the Marvel online games, and that a former NCsoft bod (Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid) is working for right now (for the 2nd time)
And NetDevil was shut down by Gazillion not too long afterwards. They don't seem all that much better than NCSoftcore tbh.
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Doc Aeon discussed the process behind that monthly story content on his blog (http://"http://mcdesignertales.blogspot.com/2012/10/studio-stories-developing-monthly.html").
It was new for City of Heroes to do monthly story content. But it didn't displace normal 'issue' content. Rather, it was mostly it's own little team apart from that. So it was MOAR than before, rushed or not. As one of the money-flinging idiots who was anything but grousing about the market, this year had more to offer than ever.
The only poor decision, I thought, was not repeating the "loyalty program." Even though some players misread that the first time and were disappointed because they actually had left to go play DCUO and didn't maintain a subscription the whole time, it was an incentive to keep subscriptions even if you weren't playing much. During the summer I saw several players mention letting subs lapse to save money (possibly indicating a broad trend, since I wasn't able to find a lot of time for the game this summer, either). After waiting several months for the loyalty program to be repeated, even I eventually decided to let my second account lapse and spend that money on more Paragon Points for my main account (now that second account is locked... d'oh!).
Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. The audience for City of Heroes was not exploding, and it appears that is the only thing that would have saved it from NCSoft's chopping block.
Sadly, I don't represent much money. I can keep making noise, though. Maybe even get into some propaganda efforts to shame NCSoft in the coming year.
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Before the thread is completely off tangent - I will say my issue with the Praetorian arc is that to make a zone where the only encouragement is to LEAVE so you can team with others - is not well thought out from a business slant.
You want players to go to your new content - similar to the solo incarnate stuff that is only slightly faster than a glacier in speed. Making a grind might be a valid playstyle but we haven't done that in this game before.
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Re: VV
I've got no intel on NetDevils' later concerns with AutoAssault. I haven't seen any indication about it.
I suppose the general concern with is the fragmentation of the dev team and loss of continuity. Even with well-documented code, it's helpful if you've got the previous generation of developers to train the next one on tips and tricks of dealing with the code. (cf, extreme example: loss of continuity with the base-building that led to anyone being afraid to make major changes to bases without breaking them).
You've also got fragmentation of the community -- people going on to play other games (or RL) and getting hooked and not just bouncing right back into the arms of CoH when it re-appears.
These two kinds of fragmentation will both be obstacles we'll need to work to overcome when #SaveCOH succeeds.
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Ok then. Of the games canceled by NCSoftcore until this point, with the exception of Tabula Rasa, it appears that no one attempted to buyout the IP after shutdown. I get the impression that the Garriott brothers did attempt to buyout post-cancellation, or acquire the IP in some other fashion. That impression may be incorrect; at that point the acrimony between NCSoftcore and the Garriotts was so high I think that NCSoftcore was inclined to wiping all the disks and burning the paper copies of the programs (assuming anyone still saves paper copies of programs) before they would let Richard have his baby back.
Short form here is it appears that no one has made an attempt to buy an IP from NCSoftcore post-shutdown. This actually has potential. They can have their cake and eat it...if the reason for shutdown is in whole or in part taking a tax write-off, they can shut down this fiscal year, then sell next fiscal year. As long as we keep pushing them and making it clear that the negativity machine is not going away.
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Yes, VV this was why I posted the original thought on this. We need to look past the imminent doom towards a brighter future.
The best scenario was Paragon Studios buying the game. I honestly don't believe anything short of 3 or 4 times what the game is worth would have moved them. If this game is to survive in some form in the future it must be run as a BUSINESS. It must make money and the purchase price must be intelligently negotiated.
I don't want anyone to throw money at the game - lose cash for 12 months and fold up bitter and disappointed. A steady methodical plan needs to be worked. In fact I would continue the plan for noise and other petitioning for 2 reasons - morale and advertising.
Has any of you stopped and realized this game has now gotten more advertising than it EVER did in 8 years? We have celebrities who know who we are now. We aren't just those silly gamers who have no life. They are seeing US, the people who make stories and live as a famous man once said - lives of quiet desperation.
Don't give up, EVER, on your dreams.
The fight is a 15 rounder not a 4 round preliminary. We need to plan and schedule for actions aftter the game is down. If not despair will set in. In a battle (and I have been a general at Pennsic planning for thousands a side) you plan for winning the initial contact and losing it. NCSoft fooled everyone with a delaying tactic - the heat of emotion cooled as we thought they were seriously at the table.
In fact I can see as I said they could have done us a favor in allowing the price to drop and the ability to not have to go in on a shoestring but instead with a plan in place and taking advantage of all the good will our community generated.
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(and I have been a general at Pennsic planning for thousands a side)
Sorry to derail the thread, but which Kingdom are you a part of?
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Sorry to derail the thread, but which Kingdom are you a part of?
Midrealm :) - I couldn't go this year as my daugter is getting married in Florida and footing the bill for that and Pennsic was a little too much.
Sir Michael Au Cluin of House Ironwolf at your service :)
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I agree with all of the post referenced below except the part quoted.
Someone said on the CoH forums when Black Pebble told us the state of play with the CoH advertising that is was him, on not much money. Player comments "well you could have asked us". The thing is, he *shouldn't* have had to ask us to do it. It should have come naturally to us.
There was no reason the players should have thought, "Oh, we should help advertise the game." And it would have been...uncouth...for the ad department to ask its customers to help fund advertising - not directly and in so many words, anyway.
Going forward, you can bet there will be fan-based efforts to do this sort of thing, but the assumption was that NCSoft was at least being professional in its running of the game. $0 ad budget? REALLY?
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I for one, didn't think about advertising until all this crap happened. I'm sure most players are the same. Usually companies advertise for themselves and the only advertising players do is casually telling friends and aquaintences "hey you should play city CoX". If the company needed advertising they should have either made a budget for it or asked us directly. Look at blizzard, WoW has been around almost as long as CoX and they still advertise it. Furthermore, how should we have gone about advertising it? Some of us paid our monthly subs but that was all the disposable income we had. Should we have not bought groceries and paid for flyers instead? It is really up to the company to advertise, not the players. As stated earlier players tell friends to play but thats as far as can be expected. If they really needed help becuase they forsaw shutdown, they should have asked. Under those circumstances we woulda done whatever it took to keep it going. Like we are doing now.
Anyway, i hope all of our efforts make the game more desirable to a potential buyer. I also hope NCSoft will actually sell. They have made no effort thus far. So let's keep on trying to save our game even when the servers go dark, something has to give sometime. Look at all the tv shows which have been brought back by fans. There is hope.
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Don't give up, EVER, on your dreams.
This might seem out of context... or not. It's an inspiring song for me. Maybe it'll work for others. Not trying to derail the thread, I've read along intently and this popped into my head when I got to this link of your post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XFA7MU9jg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XFA7MU9jg)
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NCSoft aren't doing us a favour - and perhaps more bizarrely, they're not doing themselves any favours either.
There's a whole bunch of twisty-turny ironies surrounding the issues of corporate communication, advertising, motive, and the question of IPs.
Yesterday I posted some links to Korea Times articles (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5654.msg62448.html#msg62448) about NCSoft and Nexon, going back to June this year. When I was first reading those, an odd thought began to take hold in my head...the closure of City of Heroes made even less sense to me than it had before I started looking at them.
Here's a bit of pondering I did -
- The 15% share stake Nexon bought in NCSoft was sold to them by NCSoft CEO Kim from his own stock. Prior, he owned 24% of NCSoft shares, then he sold 15% to Nexon meaning Kim now personally owns only 9% of his own company's stock and Nexon own 15% - NCSoft CEO Kim evidently really wanted this partnership of giants.
- NCSoft appears to have been conceptually pulling back to within Korea's borders for years, whereas Nexon are pushing to expand into overseas markets (especially the US).
- NCSoft have traditionally focused on making MMOs, spending years investing and developing each one. Nexon's success comes primarily from buying and marketing other developers' games (their homegrown ones seldom succeed)
- NCSoft's finance model has been biased towards subscription and 'game time' purchases at internet cafes, whereas Nexon pioneered the F2P system for MMOs
- The collaboration between NCSoft and Nexon brings a top game developer (with poor communication and marketing) to join forces with a successful marketing corporation (with poor self-developed titles)
- NCSoft have always mainly concerned themselves with desktop pc gaming, but share with Nexon a desire to "realign focus" into mobile and casual gaming
So...City of Heroes is a US-based, long established franchise, already in service successfully for years. Its finance model changed from NCSoft's favoured style to Nexon's favoured style months before Nexon were even in the picture. CoH has had numerous marketing/advertising issues in the past, but the playerbase has never dropped below profitable levels, and even pulled up under F2P, suggesting that despite its age, the game could actually prosper again if it was marketed better.
Seems to me, the NC-Nexon giant would have had far more to gain by taking advantage of their newly pooled skillsets and keeping CoH on, even if only as a testbed of corporate co-operation. The game wasn't costing the company anything because it was still profitable, albeit not massively - but at the end of the day, profit isn't loss.
So...what purpose is served by closing CoH?
That's the question I keep coming back to.
Panic button to hike share prices? I thought so initially, but the more I've looked into it, the more I think the share rise from GW2 sales would've made any share gain from CoH's closure irrelevant, so that's not a strong enough reason.
I can more understand their desire to keep the IP - Nexon might see it as something that could be developed in overseas markets in future (not domestic - superheroes don't seem to work in Korea), perhaps on a mobile platform. NCSoft would presumably be the ones making such a game from their own IP of course. If it costs you nothing to retain an IP you could use for a mutual future corporate venture, you'd be idiots to sell it really.
But an IP on ice isn't making a penny. And developing a new game based on it could take years and cost millions. And everyone would've forgotten the IP because in the meantime you've closed down the existing game and alienated the playerbase.
Now - is it just me, or does this make absolutely no sense whatsoever? ???
The more I think about it, the more I'm forced to conclude we're being shut down for one reason, and one reason only - we're old.
NC-Nexon is all about the future. Mobile gaming, shiny new platforms! Casual games, online smartphone games, e-sports...
Us? We're expendable. We're yesterday, the Ghost of Corporations Past.
Sure, Nexon's marketing savvy could've revitalised the game...so why didn't it? NCSoft's record for patience and support of development could've led to CoH enjoying pretty much a second life...but why hasn't it?
The more I think, the more I see reasons for keeping CoH alive, not killing it off.
And yet they are killing it, so whatever actual reason they had, it doesn't seem to be about business, a case of numbers on a balance sheet, or confidence from shareholders.
No, I believe this was all about image.
I think that's why their last statement took the tone it did. They wanted CoH to stay old, to stay in the past, to become nothing but memories, so they could stride together into a brave new future hand in hand.
The motto of Paragon City is "Birthplace of Tomorrow" - does anybody else see the irony here? :-\
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This is an interesting and potentially accurate observation. I want to take two elements of it and juxtapose them for some added potential clarity (though I don't know for a fact that it's accurate):
Turjan's hypothesis is that the closure is about image because CoH is "old news" and they want to look like they're breaking away from the old (ignore that the old was WORKING).
CoH is profitable, but we're not sure HOW profitable.
What would be the solution to the image problem if not to close CoH? Marketing. They'd have to do a fresh new campaign to make CoH look like a game of the future with exciting NEW things coming out that highlight the NEW advances. Marketing costs money; CoH had a $0 ad budget.
Would that marketing campaign have cost more than CoH was making, resulting in a net loss, even in the short term?
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What if they settle on selling the IP post-fiscal years end, to their own buddies at Nexon? Basically, "Why sell it to some Western publisher we have no prior dealings with when we can save face and pretty much 'keep it in the family' by selling it to Nexon with a condition that we get a percentage of the income?"
Just throwing that hypothetical scenario out there.
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What if they settle on selling the IP post-fiscal years end, to their own buddies at Nexon? Basically, "Why sell it to some Western publisher we have no prior dealings with when we can save face and pretty much 'keep it in the family' by selling it to Nexon with a condition that we get a percentage of the income?"
Just throwing that hypothetical scenario out there.
That may not be a good thing either, based on the prior post. Nexon could just as soon buy the IP, and then never launch the old MMO, OR any new incarnation of the MMO, and turn it into another generic iPhone game.
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However, of the two developers, it's NCSoft that has the success with developing titles inhouse, so there's not much logic selling an IP you successfully developed to your partner who doesn't do development as well as you do.
At this rate, you never know. Nexon could be fixing to do some realigning of their own in the coming months.