NCSoft claims they considered other options but those options were exhausted. If NCSoft tried to sell CoH, does anyone know what their asking price was?
Also, I've heard that CoH made $12 million annually and cost $4 million to operate. Does anyone know the Cost and Revenue of other MMOs so that we can compare them to this information?
Put bluntly, they didn't try. Several companies supposedly made offers and were given an incredibly unreasonable price in return, but that was never proven.
I heard rumors there were completely unreasonable "stipulations" in the deal as well. So even if a buyer was ready to cough up the ludicrous price NCsoft expected, they'd also have to deal with problematic clauses. Basically NCsoft attempted to sell CoH while making sure it would be impossible to buy CoH.
NCSoft bought CoH for $10 million.
They did so with a profit split with Cryptic for a few years. Then they valued the game at $3 million for IP tax purposes. From what "rumors" were going around they wanted $8 million or so. I would think $8-10 million would do it.
Quote from: Ironwolf on February 07, 2013, 05:54:52 PM
NCSoft bought CoH for $10 million.
They did so with a profit split with Cryptic for a few years. Then they valued the game at $3 million for IP tax purposes. From what "rumors" were going around they wanted $8 million or so. I would think $8-10 million would do it.
Except we have no actual proof of those numbers. What we have is a bunch of hearsay. I've dived into the financials of NCsoft, way more than I actually have time for, and nowhere did they ever disclose the buyout cost from Cryptic and the value of the IP for tax purposes. Cryptic was a private company at the time so there's no public numbers to look at to even make an educated guess.
Quote from: Ironwolf on February 07, 2013, 05:54:52 PM
NCSoft bought CoH for $10 million.
They did so with a profit split with Cryptic for a few years. Then they valued the game at $3 million for IP tax purposes. From what "rumors" were going around they wanted $8 million or so. I would think $8-10 million would do it.
From what "rumors" were going around, they wanted
$80 million. Not $8.
Quote from: Aggelakis on February 07, 2013, 06:21:02 PM
From what "rumors" were going around, they wanted $80 million. Not $8.
$8? I could dig that out of my couch.
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 07, 2013, 06:18:26 PM
Except we have no actual proof of those numbers. What we have is a bunch of hearsay. I've dived into the financials of NCsoft, way more than I actually have time for, and nowhere did they ever disclose the buyout cost from Cryptic and the value of the IP for tax purposes.
Welcome to the world of financial analysis. Almost everything out there is hearsay based on numbers that are disclosed. Rarely will you
ever have a company telling us detailed information about their finances or sales; it is almost always based on very broad data that's legally required as well as analysis. And not to put too fine a point on it, yes, sometimes it's based on information that is secretly disclosed by insiders.
The question is hardly ever, "Can this be definitively proven?" Instead, it's almost always, "How reliable is the source from which I am getting this information?"
When they really wanted to sell the game then you don't fire everyone from the team so suddenly. First there is the announement that the game will shutdown in three month and when in this time there is no one out there who want's to take it over, then it's time to close the studio. But this was all so... "out of nowhere" that this tells me that NC-Soft never wanted to sell the game and do everything that there is no chance for it.
Quote from: TonyV on February 07, 2013, 09:54:39 PM
$8? I could dig that out of my couch.
Wish it was $8 I would have personally flew to Korea and handed it to Kim himself assuming you didnt beat me to it.
$8 i have in won from when I was in ROK back in the 90s. :)
Quote from: dwturducken on February 08, 2013, 12:39:18 AM
$8 i have in won from when I was in ROK back in the 90s. :)
I have like $12 in Canadian money (from when I was born and lived my whole life in Canada.)
Aww, yeah. They see me rollin'. 8)
There's no harm at this point it saying that my sources who must not be disclosed at Formerly-Known-As had an offer on the table of $8 million, NOT all cash up front, that was, so far as they were concerned, being taken seriously right up to the day of the shutdown.
Was it ACTUALLY being taken seriously? Who the hell knows now?
Oh let's be honest. NCSloth just lost interest in dealing with the west, including Paragon employees. So they pulled the plug in the corporate version of a temper tantrum and went back home. And now they're startled to realize they left a big ol' PR mess behind. Like when some strip-mining company leaves a toxic mess for some small local community to clean up.
It's just corporate callousness. They're so far above the "l'il people" that we don't even exist to 'em.
As for selling CoH, I'm sure if anyone ponied up some outrageous amount of cash, say whatever they paid for CoH in the first place, they'd sell. Only that's unrealistic. The game is older, the great mass of MMO players moved on. So they just close it down and bury the code on some stick in a vault, where it never gets seen again.
$10 Million?
Thats fair for City of ..
I have a lottery ticket .. winner gets 20 million
Keep your fingers crossed for me ..
If I win, we all win!
Assuming they wanna play, yep. We'll hold you to that.
Also, we'll assume any 20 million dollar winner are you, and so we'll be hounding that person to make good on this until proven otherwise. Hope that's ok. :)
Seriously, good dang luck, thems tough odds those...
:(
Didn't win .. neither did anyone else .. so 30 million next week
:)
Might go play today. The things I could do with 30 million. Hell even 10 or 1 million