some things I'd like to relay to the author:
1) The studio was 80 people in size, but the # of people committed to only CoH will be notably less than that, since they were working on anothreturned off the profitability of that product, not a piggybacked burden off the original product. That also means that they could have just killed off the new project without any risk to the new one.
2) MMO's are expensive to launch and develop, but less so to maintain. The initial investment costs of CoH had been well paid off. Outside the costs for the studio maintaining it, there's primarily the NOC and hosting costs (server maintenance & bandwidth) to contend with. There are many books & articles written by members in the industry explaining the costs of operations and the breakdown, and, while not insignificant, the NOC, hosting, maintenance, and bandwidth are minimal. The studio's costs really would have been the biggest single expenditure and a decent metric to use for simple discussion.
3) "..., but that profit margin was likely shrinking through Q3 (the game was omitted from that report)..." Q3 measured from July through October. The shutdown was announced Mid-late August. At that time, no new purchases were made. Also at that time, subscribers stopped paying and the many subscribers that took multi-month promotions were refunded. Of COURSE revenue is going to go down in Q3 under those conditions.
4) Yes, revenue went down between Q1 and Q2... by about 1%. Compare that to the total revenue decline in the EU/NA market that NCSoft experienced (~-40% iirc) and that seems downright ROSY. Heck, CoH was the one consistent performer in that timeframe.
5) Yes, CoH earnings were small compared to NCSoft as a whole, but compare their earnings to the earnings of NCSoft in the markets where CoH is available (US/Europe). There, it was often 20-25% of total revenue. That sheds light on how NCSoft's other properties performed in those same markets.
6) There is some (probably intentional) obsfucation by both sides here. For example, maybe NCSoft DID pay only $8m for full ownership of CoH, but it was already a partial owner before that, and we have no idea how the ownership proportions were at that point (5%, 10%, 50%?) which would determine what NCSoft valued the property at when launched.
Similarly, the valuation for tax purposes is always going to be much less than the valuation for sale. For taxation purposes, there are specific metrics for valuation of a property (note, this is the IP PROPERTY, not the earnings- they $$ earnings is taxed differently). Oftentimes, a property's sale value is based on the potential earnings of that property for the next several years. Naturally, its going to be considerably higher. To compare the two like this is trying to portray NCSoft in a hypocritical light to people that don't know better. (ok, they're still hypocritical... just not for this reason.)
7) NCSoft is unsure of the success of a superhero MMO? I don't doubt it-- but that should be an indicator on how bad of a match NCSoft was for CoH more than anything. Look at the superhero films in the top-grossing blockbuster movies of the year. One of them is even custom-catered to CoH (a team of heroes must repel a giant interdimensional/alien army!). There has never been a better time to tap into the growing public's imagination and fascination with superheros.
