I don't think that NCsoft isn't totally blameless in any of these games. I'm going off of memory here, so take it for what it's worth, but as I recall, NCsoft laid off a bunch of people including some of the founders from Auto Assault, cutting it to the bone, before the game turned into a financial failure. Tabula Rasa was just kind of a SNAFU all around, especially on NCsoft's part. I mean, I can understand them being upset about Richard Garriott going on his space adventure (and make no mistake, if I had some means to do so, I'd do the exact same thing), but their reaction to it was like shooting themselves in the nose to spite their face. It was just handled VERY badly. Also as I recall (it's been a few months since I researched all of this), there was actually some other company successfully running Exteel in Asia that was paying licensing fees to NCsoft, and NCsoft chose to cancel the arrangement and deliberately kill off the game in markets in which it was doing okay. I can't really speak much to Dungeon Runners as I never played it, but I do think it's a sad day when tiny quirky MMOs are canceled.
City of Heroes was just the most egregious mistake they made, but make no mistake, mistakes were made with the other games. The biggest one is that NCsoft seems to pick and choose not just winners that they will hype and market the hell out of, but losers that they systematically cut off from any support or marketing, then supposedly look justified in killing later due to lack of interest and/or subscriber base. And not to put too fine a point on it, but marketing and support are the primary functions of a game publisher, which makes them pretty damn bad at the very thing they're supposed to be doing best as a company.
Except NCsoft was only the distributor of Auto Assault, Net Devil was their own entity, NCsoft didn't own them. So I couldn't see how NCsoft laid off developers from a company they didn't own. According to MMOCharts AA barely peaked over 11,000-12,000 players. For an MMO released in the mid 2000s, that was failure.
Yes, Tabula Rasa was a developmental train wreck that was pushed out onto the public unfinished. Here is an
article about the development of Tabula Rasa at T-machine, a blog by a former CTO for NCsoft Europe, someone who was outside of the direct development but inside enough to be included on the developers e-mail distribution lists. It's a fascinating read. He also has some things to
say about CoH's closure and our attempts to get the IP. He also has a
POV about NCsoft's development economics.
As an aside I found
this post about the player numbers NCsoft was seeing in the Korean version of CoH, no wonder they closed it.
And of course NCsoft isn't blameless, it was their money and decision making behind each of those games. But by whatever criteria they use, profit margin, outright profit (must make X amount of profit), foreseeable additional development costs, they pulled the plug on those games. But if the reports were true that it cost NCsoft 100,000 million KrW to develop and they only
foresaw 15,000 million KrW in sales in it's first year. That's a monumental failure.
That's the kind of failure that makes senior management at any company quadruple guess at every decision from that point on. The kind of failure that makes management attempt to micromanage development.