Perhaps it might be a silly question, but how much money do you think NCSoft would require in order to sell the rights to CoH/CoV. That, and how would a person go about asking that question to the powers that be?
My guess is it would be a few million to let go of the IP... more for the server/customer data if it still exists... between 2 and 5 million is my guess. If that seems excessive then you know why no one has bought it. Any company can be persuaded to sell something if the price is right. But the price NCSoft wants is likely far higher than anyone looking to make a quick profit would pay.
Yea, that is kind of what I was thinking. Every company I am sure has their price(ex, LucasArts and Disney), its just a matter of how much.
I just had a the crazy idea of putting together a kickstarter campaign to see if NCSoft could be persuaded monetarily.
I think it would run 6-8 million to buy and then another $500,000 to prep for servers and such, add in some advertising and a few devs to start the game and you are at $8-10 million.
I would say a company buying it would need to imagine a $10 million 2 year outlay before you make enough back to sustain the game and start a profit coming in.
Someone win the lottery!!!
If I had Oprah money I would buy the damn thing, hire and pay a tech team, developers, whatever and make the game 100% free for everyone with everything available and that would be that.
How much? Well considering some of the numbers trotted out surrounding the closure, yeah, we're talkinng a lot more than "a really good lotto scratcher" and more along the lines of "Daddy named me buffy and bought me a beemer"
"Now that's what I call walkin' around money!" -Mom, Futurama
Now, does anyone know a Buffy? (and I don't mean the one with the stakes)
Quote from: Eoraptor on July 06, 2013, 02:16:18 AM
How much? Well considering some of the numbers trotted out surrounding the closure, yeah, we're talkinng a lot more than "a really good lotto scratcher" and more along the lines of "Daddy named me buffy and bought me a beemer"
"Now that's what I call walkin' around money!" -Mom, Futurama
Now, does anyone know a Buffy? (and I don't mean the one with the stakes)
I know a "Buffy" but she aint budging. :(
Didn't we hear somewhere that NCSoft wanted like 80 million for it from the Paragon team? I swear that's a number that had floated around...
Quote from: JaguarX on July 06, 2013, 02:18:23 AM
I know a "Buffy" but she aint budging. :(
I know several, but none of them are gamers :P
Quote from: emperorsteele on July 06, 2013, 03:13:40 AM
Didn't we hear somewhere that NCSoft wanted like 80 million for it from the Paragon team? I swear that's a number that had floated around...
Yeah, I remember that, it was juxtaposed by the company costing only 12 million to operate and having like 4 million in physical assets. but I may be misremembering that
Quote from: emperorsteele on July 06, 2013, 03:13:40 AM
Didn't we hear somewhere that NCSoft wanted like 80 million for it from the Paragon team? I swear that's a number that had floated around...
That mirrors what I've heard from two sources now.
Quote from: downix on July 06, 2013, 05:17:08 AM
That mirrors what I've heard from two sources now.
yeah but seems no one know where that number actually originated from. It's like one of those rumors that someone took and ran with and dont even remember where and when it started.
The highest-grossing kickstarter of all time only raised around 1/8 of that, and even a record-breaking Texas lotto wouldn't cover it.
If we want City of Heroes back, we are going to have to be more inventive.
Quote from: JaguarX on July 06, 2013, 05:41:08 AMyeah but seems no one know where that number actually originated from. It's like one of those rumors that someone took and ran with and dont even remember where and when it started.
I'm pretty sure it was a guesstimate by someone on these forums and not an actual asking price though.
Quote from: downix on July 06, 2013, 05:17:08 AM
That mirrors what I've heard from two sources now.
Can you elaborate on who or what these sources were ?
Quote from: Mister Bison on July 06, 2013, 11:25:48 AM
Can you elaborate on who or what these sources were ?
Trust me, it wouldn't matter if he could or did. It would be a repeat of a discussion that's happened countless times on this and other forums. We don't know where exactly the statement originated. And if someone did know, they would likely be asked for their source. I hope you can appreciate how fruitless that would be, because at some point you are going to reach a barrier beyond which you, as a fan, cannot pass. Let's say that someone says they heard it directly from someone involved or privy to the negotiations. All of those people knew we were chomping at the bit to learn as much as we could about those negotiations. The most we got was second-hand bits from Brian Clayton, passed down through Mercedes Lackey, who complicated those bits by adding her own angle to them. I'm a fan of Mercedes Lackey, but she wasn't a source, and none of those bits included hard numbers anyway. Personally I suspect Clayton was just doing what he could to keep the fires stoked around here.
I once spent an evening trying to track down the point of origin. I found a quote on an obscure forum somewhere which I believed to be the very first reference, supposedly from a bigwig executive at another publisher who knew people inside NCSoft. Given the context of the forum thread, the person providing the quote seemed like someone everyone trusted (an industry professional). So why didn't I bookmark it or post about it? Because that's the point where I threw my hands up in the air. Supposedly, reportedly, suspected, rumored, overheard, deduced, none of these are good enough. That's all we'll ever get. A few people in the world know the answer and our
entire community may as well be an unnoticeable ant beneath their boot. If they did sign up here and post a factual number, you know what we would do? We would ask for their source.
Strikes me the more logical hope is on one of the three successor projects.
Quote from: Mister Bison on July 06, 2013, 11:25:48 AM
Can you elaborate on who or what these sources were ?
This, I think: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5437.msg57633.html#msg57633
And this: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/3/feature/7015/City-of-Heroes-Profitable-or-Not.html
*shrug* This number never made any sense, doubt it was a real figure either.
I too doubt that the figures provided were real. (its certainly possible that they are, but the evidence isn't there to back it up) However, I find it very likely that something like that went down.
Everything I have read surrounding the closure of the game and Paragon screams to me that what happened was NCSoft wanted to free up resources for Lineage and Guildwars because they were not supporting themselves; and that no one at NCSoft had any love for City of Heroes, a game which was run by a team in another country, and which had not originally been an NCSoft title. It was an easy target to kill cause it's always easier to screw someone you don't know than it is to screw the guy in the next office over.
Unfortunately, at that point, some corporate greed took over. Either someone at NCSoft said
-"No one else is going to play with my toys, even if I don't want them any more"
-or "if we sell this, we've just given ourselves new competition in the greater MMO market"
-or "every City of Heroes customer is a potential customer for lineage/guildwars, so let's force them to move"
Likely it was a combination of all three, but the first and the third are the stronest contenders in my mind. At the end of the day, they are all three weak and self-defeating lines of reasoning, but they are also the lines of reasoning that are taught every single day in business school (here I could go on a much longer rant about sociopathic thinking and circular logic in big business, but let's not do that)
So if you follow this line of reasoning it is completely possible that NCSoft would quote a figure that they know that any competitor would balk at and fans couldn't raise, just to keep the game out of someone else's hands, while still giving the appearence of good faith efforts to unload the game.
just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't really a conspiracy.