Has anyone seriously approached Valve?
Why stretch to all these weird companies like Google to whom we are a foreign concept, and a tiny gnat in an endless jungle within that MMO realm to boot, when someone like Valve already has the reach to most every PC gamer out there and the best distribution and to-your-door advertising around? (And they feature everything from the tiniest indie games and F2P MMOs to the largest big-budget titles too.)
Valve does one-shot game sales. If you go back for the DLC that alone is something for them. To Valve, even 40,000 sub-paying CoH players might seem a great boon when their own online games are all F2P lobbies. And yet they have *some* multiplayer server experience that spans back many years (the original Half Life runs on a pentium 133 MHz, which was back in the age of Voodoo 3D for Pete's sake). So it wouldn't be an unheard-of jump for them to extend into the MMORPG realm, especially on the small scale we can easily run with for CoH.
And they have their own studio, of course, but if SOMEBODY actually breaks down and talks to them before the rest of Paragon Studios totally fades away forever (didn't some of them just lose their new jobs with Trion, etc. again quite recently?) then maybe we could actually bring some sort of core team of PS back together for the deal, too.
Perhaps it's time, before any more of PS fades away, and before NCSoft fades away too (or worse, changes their stance yet again about not selling) to send Valve, a mighty professional PC gaming distribution channel with billions in financial backing and a soft spot for the little games too, a copy of The Almighty Pitch.
Or maybe Brian Clayton would be better to actually do it? Does he even read the boards here? I'll bet he can be reached via LinkedIn if not.
This makes so much sense it's really surprising no one, especially those on the actual PS team, have thought of it yet. I mean, the worst Valve and NCSoft can say is no. But it's a lot more believable and doable than some other ideas that are floating around, really.