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 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?