Titan Network
Graveyard => Save Paragon Retirees => Save Paragon City! => Topic started by: Rae on March 19, 2013, 06:47:43 PM
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http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/city-of-heroes-villains-putting-claims-to-the-test/
I can't get this to open on my phone, but this dropped into my inbox today. It's a response to the anonymous source who spoke out about CoH being in profit.
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good unbiased by the numbers and stuff that can be verified information. Exactly what I was looking for so I can see clearly what might had actually happened and or why.
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Definitely a bit sobering, but paints a well-structured picture of the situation. Still, there's hope in it, as well. The big take-away is the article's conclusion that where CoH/V was failing was in bringing in new blood. It makes an interesting claim about numbers and advertising around Going Rogue, but I have to admit, GR came out during the span of time I'd fallen away, myself, and I never heard of it until I came back, so I question the "advertising blitz."
I'm not saying the article is bunk; it's got some very good, if not heartening, points. But I think, speaking at least for the Phoenix Project (http://missingworldsmedia.com/forums/index.php), we can learn from what is said there and make sure we focus on building as well as maintaining the community, and perhaps resolve the population-trend problem that CoH/V seemed to be facing. Still, it is sobering but healthy to examine the situation that CoH/V was in, and make sure we can avoid those pitfalls. Our newer technology will likely help, but in the end, it's going to have to be about the community constantly working to grow. We will be behind the effort, but it's going to have to be something our players, our audience, our fans, you, all of us work to do as this goes forward.
Because, we are heroes, and that is what we do.
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The takeaway message: NOT ADVERTISING YOUR GAME IS STUPID.
Had CoX gotten the advertising revenue it needed AND DESERVED, we might not be in the abysmal situation we're in now. "Advertising blitz," my posterior.
Although peeks at Plan Z's progress give me hope! Would it NOT BE ironic if we ended up with a better, thriving game in the long run, because NCS declined to give CoX any media coverage. Hah, that would be delicious.
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...But laced with a lot of personal opinions. For example, the fact that he divided claims up into "Verifiable," "Unbelievable," and "Unverifiable" should be a clue that he's not just presenting information, but forming opinions on it.
I would take issue with several of his claims. For example:
First of all, he's filed this under "Unbelievable." Really? Not unverifiable? He has absolutely no idea what the operating costs were, low, high, or otherwise. He guesstimates an average of US$50k and points out that the average salary "in the gaming industry" was $80k. What he completely neglects is that not everyone at the studio was "in the gaming industry," and not all salaries in the industry add up to that average of $80k. There were also marketing people, accountants, administrative assistants, HR people, community relations people, possibly a janitor, maybe even some part-time or contract people that were part of that 80-person staff. Plus, I hate to say this, but people like story writers, artists, and less techie people are notoriously underpaid in the industry; I assure you that they weren't making $80k or even $50k.
This also neglects the fact that of those 80 people, probably a small minority of them, I'd guess 30 or 35 of them, were actively working on City of Heroes, with maybe another 5 to 10 headcount that could be thrown in as shared resources. Half the studio was working on the new project. So let's take a more reasonable average, say $40k per person average, times 40 people, and that comes up to $1.6 million total. Even if you throw in an extra 42% for benefits, that comes up to around $2.3 million total. Even using his figure of $10.4 million in revenue and using, I dunno, another $2 million as the operations budget for the game, City of Heroes would be pulling in around $6.1 million in profit, a nice little sum.
He also mentions:
WHAT marketing push? The only ads I saw were on the City of Heroes web site itself. Were there any print ads? Was there some huge Internet marketing campaign I missed? My local Gamestop didn't carry any boxed copies of Going Rogue, and it was supposed to be one of the pre-launch goodie partners. I've heard from various people who worked for Paragon Studios that they were provided virtually no marketing budget, and what little they got was fought for tooth and nail. The notion that there was a "sizable" marketing push around Going Rogue and/or Freedom is laughable.
Also, he presents a graph showing the 2012 revenue of the game. There are two huge glaring problems with that graph. First, while he notes that earnings reporting was discontinued in Q3 2012, the graph doesn't visually really discern that. That short, stubby little $5 million bar only represents half a year (or three quarters, if he meant that it was discontinued after Q3; he's a bit unclear on that), whereas all of the other bars represent a full year. Second, he completely ignores one of the main points of contention between Paragon Studios indirectly and most of the Save CoH leadership, which is that NCsoft was cooking the books, shuffling numbers around, to make CoH look more unprofitable than it actually was. Not necessarily illegally, mind you; they may have been doing things like billing costs shared among all of their studios and/or games disproportionately against CoH's bottom line in order to make other games look better on the bottom line. Or maybe they were doing something illegal, I'm not sure.
What I do know is that I have heard the same thing from multiple sources that MMORPG.com reported, which is that people who were in the financial know at Paragon Studios have reported that CoH was more profitable following the release of CoH: Freedom than before, and the game was making a lot of money for NCsoft. Without access to the actually book and financial data, it boils down to a he-said/she-said scenario. Do you believe the former members of Paragon Studios, or do you believe NCsoft? Personally, I believe the former members of Paragon Studios. The people I've talked to have no incentive to lie at this point, most of them have new jobs. There was no reason for whoever MMORPG.com talked to to talk to MMORPG.com and tell them what they said; in fact, under the NDA and/or severance package they were under, they were likely risking financial loss by doing so. NCsoft, on the other hand, has a direct financial and public relations interest in making everyone believe that they are operating in a fiscally responsible way even if they aren't. So who do you believe?
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Unsub or think that he's out to destroy anyone's reputation or anything. I just think that he's like the rest of us: He has access to a very small amount of data, data that at least some people (myself included) believes is suspect, and is trying to suss out the truth. He raises some valid points, makes some invalid points, and more than anything else, proceeds upon assumptions that may or may not be true without recognizing those assumptions.
I'm talking about the charts and stuff. The commentary of course it's biased and didn't pay attention to it. I don't think someone could write an unbias no conflict of interest article or written works if the prize was 200 million dollars. But personally at this point I only belive charts and stuff that can actually be verified and not hearsay. Maybe the game was profitable after f2p in greater amount maybe it wasn't. Haven't seen hard fact or chart for or nay either side yet and thus just speculation. Even the definition of profitable have dozens of meaning within same organization
Just came from meeting about whether or not a move actuslly saved money or not, equipment purchase. Ask one guy of organization they will say hell yeah ask another they will say its a waste.
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I'm talking about the charts and stuff...But personally at this point I only belive charts and stuff that can actually be verified and not hearsay.
This is what I'm talking about too, and was addressed in my post above. What do you mean, "can actually be verified"? By looking at the NCsoft investor relations reports composed by NCsoft, released by NCsoft, and disseminated by NCsoft? That has been a major point of contention, the claim that these reports do not accurately represent the state of City of Heroes and/or Paragon Studios.
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This is what I'm talking about too, and was addressed in my post above. What do you mean, "can actually be verified"? By looking at the NCsoft investor relations reports composed by NCsoft, released by NCsoft, and disseminated by NCsoft? That has been a major point of contention, the claim that these reports do not accurately represent the state of City of Heroes and/or Paragon Studios.
Yeah I heard. I have a feelung there will never be a straight answer on the finance of cox. Thud I'll just go by what was taken as fact without question prior to the closing incident. After that just looks like hearsay. On one hand the call of contention seems too coincidence with closing thus when there wasn't any prior. If they van show proof of contention maybe so but in that regards only have the finance people if ncsoft. Wish an actual third party would, professional finance preferred unaffected by the game, and not newpaper or magazine or media would take a look and see. I have a feeling that something isn't right but without solid evifence its just a feeling.
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This article hits all the myths and some facts.
The other side of the low point in 2011/2012 was the NCSoft had to buy out some folks and also run the servers for 3 months for free. Added to that is severance and shutdown costs.
You really need to look at one question: What was the advertising budget?
Since Black Pebble (I think it was) said he was a one man show and didn't have enough budget to even have a booth at a game convention.............the budget was nothing - under $100k.
Can't keep a multi-million dollar product afloat on a 1% advertising budget.
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You really need to look at one question: What was the advertising budget?
Now that is the question that have my number 1 attention out of all questions dealing with this.
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The takeaway message: NOT ADVERTISING YOUR GAME IS STUPID.
Had CoX gotten the advertising revenue it needed AND DESERVED, we might not be in the abysmal situation we're in now. "Advertising blitz," my posterior.
Although peeks at Plan Z's progress give me hope! Would it NOT BE ironic if we ended up with a better, thriving game in the long run, because NCS declined to give CoX any media coverage. Hah, that would be delicious.
I can't recall ever seeing the game advertized. I was always curious about that.
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I can't recall ever seeing the game advertized. I was always curious about that.
I think even with a quarter of advertising that normal games get it would of been a monster or at least had a fighting chance of being one.
Hell, I never heard of the game I just happen to come across it in a store and thought it looked neat and found it was good shared it with a friend. So out of my purchase it turned to two. Now if it was advertised more eyes. But that is just me. Just that so many serious gamers that I know never even heard of COX. Some heard about it after the closing and some of them said they would have definately tried it out if they knew it existed.
Hopefully Plan Z can get some advertising, at least in the gamer mag website. That cant be too expensive and maybe a general spot on youtube or tv or something in the far term.
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I can't recall ever seeing the game advertized. I was always curious about that.
I saw a blurb for it once. It was when CoV was new, and it was about a half-page in Wizard magazine. IIRC it even had a quote from Mercedes in there, something about how she enjoyed being a villain and it was great stress-relief to run around the Isles doing evil. [truth!] To go along with the text, they had a picture of an Arachnos soldier, think it was a Wolf Spider. At the time I thought that was Lord Recluse and I was like, "cool." I thought the armor was beautiful. It wasn't too long after that I bought CoV. I have always regretted not having saved that page as a keepsake.
So I get in the game and I actually SEE Recluse and I was like, "Oh my."
Also seen in Wizard, a professional concept-art piece of a group of Carnival of Shadows. It was beautiful, printed very small but beautiful. I have never seen it one time anywheres else, and I regret not having saved that, too. Damn it.
Never seen so much of a mention anywheres else other than the odd flash of CoH stuff on "Big Bang Theory."
I call that "setting something up to fail." I don't think NCSoft ever wanted that game to succeed, I think they were surprised it did as well as it did. You don't totally neglect something that you have a big stake in & want to see succeed.
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I call that "setting something up to fail." I don't think NCSoft ever wanted that game to succeed, I think they were surprised it did as well as it did. You don't totally neglect something that you have a big stake in & want to see succeed.
Sounds about right.
Classic text book self-fulfilling the stereotype of there is no market for super hero mmos and people only want to play fantasy mmos. But I think COX did better than they expected.
Two games came out around that 2004 time period. One went on to be a great game a hidden gem the other a game where you cant walk into a game store without seeing a poster for it, or at least in 2005, commericals abound, and cultural reference in any media that even mentions MMORPG and thus became a powerhouse. Same time period same opportunity, one had good backing and sense the other..."Uhhh they expected a product to be big when no one knows of it existance?" It was a miracle that COX got as large as it did. A great feat actually
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The biggest factor coloring my opinion of this, or any other, piece about, well, really anything is the source. I in no way hold a blog post to the same journalistic standards that I would an article on a trade news website. Let's face it: any @$$hat with meager word processing skills and an internet connection can throw a blog out there.
This person has done some leg work. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that. The presentation is even entertaining. Is it correct? I don't care, at this point. I'm far from giving up hope, but, until the next CtA, I'm keeping one eye here and the other eye on the happenings and goings on over at Plan Z. Quite frankly, with each passing month (and we're coming up on the end of four), Plan Z is getting better and better odds.
I appreciate Rae pointing this out. (I'm not sure why it didn't show up in my Google News bot, but I may not have the settings right for blogs.) After almost four months, I'm just glad someone outside the Titan Network forums cares enough one way or the other to put something like this together, unsolicited.
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As for salaries Tony, you may want to check this (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/) out, a salary calculator that will show you what your equivalent salary needs to be in another city.
For example, an equivalent salary in San Jose, CA if you made $25K in Austin, TX is $40.5K. $4 million does seem a tad low. Not outrageously so, just a tad.
I would say that article was a pretty fair assessment of the various rumors.
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There were full-page ads for Going Rogue put in comic books at the time, (I saw one in a back-issue copy of Fringe that I just picked up), and the Complete Collection was available in my Walmart store's shelves. I don't remember seeing much else, though.
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I can't recall ever seeing the game advertized. I was always curious about that.
I remember seeing two-page splash advertisements in comics back in 2004, and I believe I saw a few pushing CoV right around its release, but the advertising choked off hard pretty quickly within a couple months of CoV's release and never came back.
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i agree that the main problem was the severe lack of advertising
the only form of "advertising" that coh had was word of mouth from us players to get other poeple to try it but that was about it
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I think even with a quarter of advertising that normal games get it would of been a monster or at least had a fighting chance of being one.
Oh hell yes, it would've.
Just a short in-theater ad, or tv ad or heck, even a bus-stop or magazine ad during the big Super Hero Movie Explosion would've helped heaps. It's pretty easy to see how out of touch and/or neglectful NCsoft is/was when you realize the magnitude of the opportunity that they missed. Especially since CoX was casual- and noob-friendly!
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Not to make a mention of that the poster feels that COH had a great long time customer base but failed in attracting new customers. So how do you attract new customers? Advertising. No advertising = No new customers.
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As for salaries Tony, you may want to check this (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/) out, a salary calculator that will show you what your equivalent salary needs to be in another city.
For example, an equivalent salary in San Jose, CA if you made $25K in Austin, TX is $40.5K. $4 million does seem a tad low. Not outrageously so, just a tad.
I would say that article was a pretty fair assessment of the various rumors.
That's actually just a cost-of-living adjustment; it tells what your equivalent salary needs to be to maintain the same standard of living in the new city. It doesn't tell you what someone in your equivalent job position makes in that city. Unfortunately for we Californians, the two never quite seem to match up. Also, I doubt many of the Paragon staff could afford to live in San Jose, let alone Mountain View; most probably commuted from further out.
Anyway, I agree that $4 million for Paragon seems a tad low to me, but could be accurate if a significant number of the 80 staff commonly cited were clerical, part-time or intern positions.
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I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.
I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.
C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.
I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.
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The other thing to take into account with a cost of living number is that it's been a generation since the average household had just one income.
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Not to make a mention of that the poster feels that COH had a great long time customer base but failed in attracting new customers. So how do you attract new customers? Advertising. No advertising = No new customers.
Advertising isn't cheap. Advertising on the scale you'd need for an international MMO isn't cheap at all. Not when you're working on $10 to $12 million in revenues to begin with. And its not like there wasn't advertisement for Going Rogue or Freedom to begin with.
It didn't really dawn on me until I hobo'd around a few MMOs and read Unsub's article. I'm surprised it took me this long to realize. To put it in succinct layman's terms:
NCSoft shut down City of Heroes because the game wasn't growing. The game wasn't growing because its architecture couldn't support a Free To Play model that could compete with other games.
But wait, you say, Freedom didn't fail! And probably some other things as well, so let me get to explaining in the long form.
Once, long ago in an MMO industry far away, the subscription model was king. You paid your $15 a month, you bought the expansions, and everything was good. And then we learned new words like Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and TARP. Unsub coincided the huge drop in revenues after June 2009 on Champions, remember this was also the same point where the economy hit rock bottom before the recovery.
So subs are dead, but Turbine comes along with a Free To Play model and, from all reports, they make out like bandits. More games follow suit, and the subscription model starts to look dated. Paragon releases Mission Architect and Going Rogue, but neither are able to bring their revenues back to pre-2009 numbers. Revenues are in bad shape and aren't going up, so maybe everyone else is on to something with this Free To Play thing so Paragon and NCSoft give it a shot. That's why Freedom didn't fail, in as much as it stabilized revenues and gave the game another year to live. But it didn't grow revenues and that was always going to be a problem.
But they could've advertised more, you say! And they could've. And new gamers would've logged in to City of Heroes and found themselves locked out stuff like being able to shout and chat and access the market and access the end game. Well, alright, they could've spent money, like the $15 a month they didn't have to begin with. And there in lay the problem.
Take Cryptic, Turbine, and Arenanet for example. They all have ways to earn cash shop items and subscription benefits in-game. I can grind for dilithium in Star Trek Online and have enough Zen to buy myself a shiny new starship. I can convert gold to gems in Guild Wars 2 and buy myself another character slot. Or I wouldn't even need to grind that much, just convert enough and play the remainder out of pocket. Basically, I'm getting a discount simply for playing the game. In City of Heroes, we never had that option.
And, from the looks of it, we never could. Cryptic's original code was never designed to be able to convert to a Free To Play system and we're all well aware of just how, uh, spotty the code documentation was. In - rough estimate - two years of pre- and post-Freedom development, the only way Paragon had found out how to deliver items from the Paragon Market was through us via the mail system. There was no option to send currency back to the market. They didn't even develop an in-game cash shop, they had to source that out to a third party. That could've been NCSoft's diktat, but I'm remiss to think why they would've jumped through all those hoops if they could've put the shop in-game. I'm willing to admit I'm wrong if otherwise.
So, we had a model where freemiums could play the game, but they couldn't get the discount for playing the game that they got just about everywhere else. You want to shout and access the market, there was no alternative beyond paying for it. And if you want to access the end game which was getting half of all the new stuff added to the game, you were looking at the $15 a month you probably didn't have to begin with. This is a great system if you wanted to keep your big spenders and long-term customers happy, and we're all well aware how well Paragon was able to do so. For new gamers who didn't have much in the way of money to spend, however, uh, they got the short end of the stick. And gamers being gamers and most of them not tied to the superhero genre, they went the path of lesser resistance. And City of Heroes trucked along, but it was unable to grow. And NCSoft, obviously, didn't approve. And here we are. :/
EDIT: And I could throw in another paragraph or two about the Pay 4 Power trend in MMOs and how Paragon was stuck behind that curve as well. That ship has sailed and it hasn't hit any icebergs yet, but there's still raw feelings about it so I'll leave it be.
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It never ceases to amaze me how people who say they love these MMORPGs, and promote the format, are so quick to take the side of the publisher against the fans. It's like a beaten wife making excuses for her husband, or a crack addict making excuses for his dealer.
Was it profitable? Was it not profitable? The very fact that such questions make a difference to us shows why this entire premise on which this industry is built is flawed. How can people like you and I--everyone on these boards--take responsibility for profitability? We can't, yet we are held accountable as if we can, because our good things are taken away from us, while the seller's good things remain locked away.
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Was it profitable? Was it not profitable? The very fact that such questions make a difference to us shows why this entire premise on which this industry is built is flawed.
Uh, its that premise that gives us video games to begin with.
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Uh, its that premise that gives us video games to begin with.
There's a pile of playable Sega cartridges in my closet that testifies to the contrary.
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There's a pile of playable Sega cartridges in my closet that testifies to the contrary.
That pile of playable cartridges doesn't consume power 24/7 and doesn't require a technical support staff to answer questions and help stuck players.
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You want to shout and access the market, there was no alternative beyond paying for it.
And you could use tells and broadcasts by paying as little as five dollars once, as well as actually using the stuff you bought with those five dollars. Keep in mind that the initial free-to-play model - the 2-week trial accounts - did ship with unrestricted communication.
It's a fair guess, I think, that the freem channel restrictions weren't implemented to lock them out, but to avoid a repeat of the Days of Spam.
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That pile of playable cartridges does consume power 24/7 and doesn't require a technical support staff to answer questions and help stuck players.
If there was indeed a bill to keep the servers on, we certainly never knew how much, and they certainly never gave us an option to pay for it.
And as far as technical support is concerned, most of that was automated anyway. Why is it that we can find technical support in non-online games in threads and wikis even now, long after the games were published? Besides, we did a pretty good job of doing that on our own with the Paragon Wiki.
We seem to think that the need for a live team justifies the publisher's right to take away the things we buy. I think we give these scummy publishers too much credit. Instead, it's the need for the publisher's right to take away the things we buy that justifies the live team. They want us dependent on them.
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Also keep in mind that it's unlikely that the GMs only deal with one game - thus, it's not like there was a gaggle of idle CoH GMs chatting around the cooler while waiting for CoH-specific assistance requests. Furthermore, any CoH petitions were funded by CoH's own subscribers, as VIP players were the only tier entitled to GM support - freems and preems had to make do with unofficial assistance.
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I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.
I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.
C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.
I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.
This forum has one purpose - Save or Restore City of Heroes.
If you don't agree with our purpose, please politely leave and let us pursue our efforts unmolested. You aren't saving us, waking us up, doing us a favor or any other so called "noble" effort on your part. We know the chances of success and we know the costs of failure. The cost of failure is higher than we want to pay.
We are not delusional, we have seen all of the games currently on offer and they are completely inferior in every way to CoH. I can play a super-jumping robotic legged experimentally tweaked Guppy with retractable claws in CoH - no where else in the world is that possible.
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I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.
I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.
C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.
I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.
But if this was true, and I don't believe it was, why wouldn't NCSoft just pocket the $8-10M they could have had as pure profit and sold it on ? They could then have forgotten about the game having got back what they paid for it.
I happen to believe the $4M/year was just the CoH expenses (not much more than 1/3 of PS staff were on CoH) and PS about broke even despite 2/3 of the staff working on something that hadn't generated a cent yet. There is also the dodgy accounting question in that there was a strong suspicion that points bought but not yet spent were credited to NCSoft and only switched over to CoH when they were spent, I know I had $50+ of unspent points at the end so the last year's revenue figures were probably artificially low.
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And you could use tells and broadcasts by paying as little as five dollars once, as well as actually using the stuff you bought with those five dollars. Keep in mind that the initial free-to-play model - the 2-week trial accounts - did ship with unrestricted communication.
It's a fair guess, I think, that the freem channel restrictions weren't implemented to lock them out, but to avoid a repeat of the Days of Spam.
True, but again the only route to get those rights was by spending $5. Not everyone who wants to play is going to have that $5 right now, or in the immediate future. Put in a Paragon Points exchange and now you've given those players a carrot and cut the spammers off at the knees.
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If there was indeed a bill to keep the servers on, we certainly never knew how much, and they certainly never gave us an option to pay for it.
And as far as technical support is concerned, most of that was automated anyway. Why is it that we can find technical support in non-online games in threads and wikis even now, long after the games were published? Besides, we did a pretty good job of doing that on our own with the Paragon Wiki.
We seem to think that the need for a live team justifies the publisher's right to take away the things we buy. I think we give these scummy publishers too much credit. Instead, it's the need for the publisher's right to take away the things we buy that justifies the live team. They want us dependent on them.
Oh, its this argument again. Yeah, uh, good luck and godspeed.
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I happen to believe the $4M/year was just the CoH expenses (not much more than 1/3 of PS staff were on CoH) and PS about broke even despite 2/3 of the staff working on something that hadn't generated a cent yet. There is also the dodgy accounting question in that there was a strong suspicion that points bought but not yet spent were credited to NCSoft and only switched over to CoH when they were spent, I know I had $50+ of unspent points at the end so the last year's revenue figures were probably artificially low.
I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.
That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.
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I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.
That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.
TR was different, they stabbed that in the front by forcibly Koreanizing it before release and causing it to fall between the Korean and US stools, and then surprise surprise, they found it didn't make money, it was too Korean for the west and not Korean enough for the east.
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Furthermore, any CoH petitions were funded by CoH's own subscribers, as VIP players were the only tier entitled to GM support - freems and preems had to make do with unofficial assistance.
Incorrect. Freem and preem could get assistance through email and website. VIPs could get assistance through email, website, and in-game.
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I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.
That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.
As much as we love pointing at how Tabula Rasa was cut, it was a proven flop of a game by comparison. The only thing bad about what happened there was that NCSoft committed fraud by forging a resignation when there was no such thing.
Not so much cold as it was a business necessity. What happened with CoH doesn't compare much.
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The only thing I ever remember seeing was a banner ad on a game forum. Once. When COH went f2p. I have seen more and bigger ads for flash games, honestly. That probably blew the ad budget, though. Put 'em out...what...$20. >:(
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End: I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.
With no snark at all meant, then, this probably isnt the place for you.
It surprised me how many people out there do not understand [or like, whichever] this concept: the concept of Triumphing Over Odds. It surprises so many people that players, who spent literally years invested in paranormal characters - said paranormals spending their entire careers triumphing over odds - are willing to try again to triumph over long odds in creating a new home to assuage their anguish regarding the home they lost.
If you are defeated once, I guess the prevailing conventional wisdom is to say "**** it, I lost and its time to move on."
NO. This is not an acceptable option for many people. A good thing is WORTH FIGHTING FOR. We have at least one new project in development, and it looks really interesting. Now is no time to curl into a fetal ball and start crying "WOE NEVER SHALL WE HAVE IT AGAIN!!!" Be defeated if you want to.
I think I'll pass.
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I really don't believe any numbers I see posted in articles. I know from my time playing and looking at the server select screen that many servers went from green light to double yellow or from yellow to red. This began with freedom launch which included a server capacity increase for all servers.
You then take the fact that before freedom we were paying 15$ a month and after that some of us were paying even more. Myself I had 3 accounts all paid with nearly all of the costume packs purchased on 2 of them and all of them purchased on my main. My main had 90ish paragon reward tokens. I know I'm not the only one that dropped hundreds of dollars on booster packs.
For every 15$ spent on the paragon market you might as well consider that an extra subscriber.
It has also been stated my Matt Miller in several article and videos that the games profits were rising and higher than they had been in years.
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As much as we love pointing at how Tabula Rasa was cut, it was a proven flop of a game by comparison. The only thing bad about what happened there was that NCSoft committed fraud by forging a resignation when there was no such thing.
Errr NO.
My understanding is that TR was pretty much ready to go when NCSoft sabotaged it by insisting on some changes (against the wishes of the developers) that made it more grindy and completely ruined it for the western market, ensuring it could never work. I think there was more annoyance about this than the actual closure.
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Errr NO.
My understanding is that TR was pretty much ready to go when NCSoft sabotaged it by insisting on some changes (against the wishes of the developers) that made it more grindy and completely ruined it for the western market, ensuring it could never work. I think there was more annoyance about this than the actual closure.
Source for this?
Issue is I don't think I heard anything of the sort until long after we demonized NCSoft over what it's done to City of Heroes.
Furthermore, even if true, it still doesn't apply to the point I marked. The attitude is that NCSoft is cold and harsh, and we long forget that if not for that company, City of Heroes wouldn't have lived long enough for many of us to have even heard of it. And I was pointing out that the attitude that 'we should've seen this coming since Tabula Rasa' doesn't seem to make sense.
After all, they didn't forge the resignation of any Paragon Studios employees, and didn't demand game-crippling features to appeal to a different market. (If they did do the latter, many of us wouldn't be trying to save a game that legitimately collapsed.)
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Source for this?
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/01/16/we-need-to-talk-about-tabula-rasa-when-will-we-talk-about-tabula-rasa/
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It wasn't my intention to start the profitable argument again. It was my intention to state there is a difference to the stack of cartridges vs running servers. Even if most of the help system was automated, it still needs to have some staff to take care of it and handle problems that it can't handle. All of that said, I believe one of two things happened:
- NC didn't know where to take the game next.
- NC got into some kind of financial trouble and couldn't put into coh what it needed.
Of the two, I really think the latter. Ever since villains came out, I've felt that the game lost direction for a year or two. Then NC started trying to modernize it after pouring a lot of cash into another project that wouldn't perform like coh did in its golden days. (Aeon comes to mind) The updates that were done in recent times took on an increasingly gimmicky feel.
Now, I'm not attacking the devs here. They did a really great job keeping the game alive as long as they did. My hat is off to them. In developing other games, NC probably painted itself in a financial corner and couldn't support all the games. They took a gamble on which one to cut. They gambled wrong and an entire division paid the price as well as the community that grew up out of the game. The community remains strong even to this day as evidenced by the efforts being made to recover the game. Of course no one likes to admit they made a mistake and that pride could very well be the reason why coh remains offline and might forever.
Now I don't know if my opinion is correct. I maybe well off base here. But I do say this to NCSoft's executives. If I am right and you killed the game by mistake, don't make another mistake by letting pride stand in the way. Recover the community and their meeting place (aka the game), let it go to the public domain or license it out to another company. Or think of it this way, it's a profit center you chose to kill off thus limiting your profits. As an investor, that doesn't make me very happy. If you have a profit center you're not making profits from then as an investor I have to ask why it is not being used and what needs to be done to make it turn profits. If it is being retired then I to know what will replace it. And, I want to know what you're doing about the public relations problem killing the profit center will cause. I'd ask the same regardless of which one would have been killed.
Lady Vamp aka Flying Snow Mouse
Rodent Consortium SuperGroup
"Making the streets safe for normal people"
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Furthermore, even if true, it still doesn't apply to the point I marked. The attitude is that NCSoft is cold and harsh, and we long forget that if not for that company, City of Heroes wouldn't have lived long enough for many of us to have even heard of it. And I was pointing out that the attitude that 'we should've seen this coming since Tabula Rasa' doesn't seem to make sense.
The point I was trying to make with Tabula Rasa was using it as an example of NCSoft's standard of abruptly cutting bait if the project fails to meet corporate goals. Compare TR to Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea, for example. Now, admittedly, they did give City more chances than TR, but in the end we both wound up getting the short end of the stick.
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I really don't believe any numbers I see posted in articles. I know from my time playing and looking at the server select screen that many servers went from green light to double yellow or from yellow to red. This began with freedom launch which included a server capacity increase for all servers.
You then take the fact that before freedom we were paying 15$ a month and after that some of us were paying even more. Myself I had 3 accounts all paid with nearly all of the costume packs purchased on 2 of them and all of them purchased on my main. My main had 90ish paragon reward tokens. I know I'm not the only one that dropped hundreds of dollars on booster packs.
For every 15$ spent on the paragon market you might as well consider that an extra subscriber.
It has also been stated my Matt Miller in several article and videos that the games profits were rising and higher than they had been in years.
After they switched to F2P, we started getting all sorts of things, faster than we had ever gotten them before. This leads me to believe that the money was rolling in. You don't start putting out more content with less money than ever. More content means there were more resources.
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Source for this?
Issue is I don't think I heard anything of the sort until long after we demonized NCSoft over what it's done to City of Heroes.
Furthermore, even if true, it still doesn't apply to the point I marked. The attitude is that NCSoft is cold and harsh, and we long forget that if not for that company, City of Heroes wouldn't have lived long enough for many of us to have even heard of it. And I was pointing out that the attitude that 'we should've seen this coming since Tabula Rasa' doesn't seem to make sense.
After all, they didn't forge the resignation of any Paragon Studios employees, and didn't demand game-crippling features to appeal to a different market. (If they did do the latter, many of us wouldn't be trying to save a game that legitimately collapsed.)
I disagree - without NCSoft, Cryptic would have sold it to someone else. That someone else may have kept discipline and kept Paragon focused on CoH and CoH 2. Perhaps if Valve had bought it or some other entity.
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I disagree - without NCSoft, Cryptic would have sold it to someone else. That someone else may have kept discipline and kept Paragon focused on CoH and CoH 2. Perhaps if Valve had bought it or some other entity.
The problem with the alternative, is that no telling what would have happened. It's a all a guess with any guess being just as valid and just as reliable as the next. Maybe someone else would have bought it, maybe not, maybe there would have been an issue, since at that time ncsoft did own 50 50 and even if cryptic sold their half to someone else, if they could ncsoft may be still involved. Maybe not. Maybe Valve steam or some other game company would have swooped in and saved the day and COX would have lived happily ever after. Maybe not. Maybe some company liek EA would have swooped in and COX would have been axed ages ago. Maybe not. One thing is for sure though, since NCSoft by definition created Paragon studios and thus that brought a wonderful team together that was like a miracle and perfect storm of talent, and devs that cared about the game, I doubt that even if some other game company bought it, the game would be what we know as COX as we know it and that chemistry that somehow worked with the creation of paragon studios would have happened anywhere else. Maybe the next buyer would have thought someone else other than Matt was best suited for leading COX or maybe Matt would have stayed with NCSoft and be working on another project which that little move with one guy probably would have changed a whole lot in the time line that we know now. On one hand I see where people that say "without NCsoft" on the other hand I see where others come from if ncsoft wasnt involved. It could have went either way. For all we know Nov. 30th was inevitable and even if sold the likes of EA or some other game company that dont give a crap about super hero games would have basically stripped the devs off COX to work on another WoW clone and let COX languish until its a shell of it's former self stuck in in single digit issue with no update no support full of bigs (kind of like how CO is now) until they tire of it and close it Nov 30th 2012 with reason of the game wasnt making money and realignment of company focus. Or we could be going on issue 29 with issue 30 on the horizon and sale exceeding WoW with millions of subscrptions and banners in every Game Stop store.
I think there is a reason, although I dont know, that humans cant see multiple streams of time.
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I think there is a reason, although I dont know, that humans cant see multiple streams of time.
Ever heard of spontaneous combustion? Those are the people that could see multiple time streams. They just couldn't handle the frustration of watching people make stupid decisions and burst into flames.
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Ever heard of spontaneous combustion? Those are the people that could see multiple time streams. They just couldn't handle the frustration of watching people make stupid decisions and burst into flames.
Given the state of the world today I wonder if any are left. If so think we can find one and have them tell us what would have happened in the other streams of time?
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I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point...
What's clear to me in all this is no matter how calmly and rationally one approaches a topic it is nearly impossible to write an "unbiased" opinion about a topic that one cares enough about to obtain more than a superficial understanding of. It would be far more effective in promoting a rational discussion to be open and honest about our viewpoints and opinions thus assisting the readers in correcting for them. An opinion which is both unbiased and informed is essentially an oxymoron.
Biased and superficial is also how I view the rest of your post. You make vague reference to "facts" you do not possess (or at very least choose not to substantiate). You make predictions about the future and assert them with certainty which you cannot realistically possess. You also (as others have noted) fail to comprehend the purpose and meaning of this forum even though it's very clearly stated in the title. I doubt you would go to a "Stop Animal Cruelty" forum and tell the people there to give it up. So why is it you're so seemingly thoughtless in the case of "Save Paragon City"?
On the bright side, you've highlighted the issue of bias in a way that I hoped others would see, so kudos for that.
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In truth, lack of bias is only useful and good when one does not know much about a subject. One should certainly go into an unknown or incompletely-known situation with as little bias as possible, and as much willingness to take in facts as possible.
But experts cannot be unbiased and be intellectually honest, nor even moral nor ethical.
After all, while one might find going into a debate over a hot-button political issue such as environmentalism to be laudable if one doesn't know the facts. But if one knows the facts, one would hope that the nature of those facts would clearly spell out whether you're for or against it.
Would you find it laudable if a man who knew for a fact that one more car on the road would cause the glaciers to melt and the sea level to rise 100 feet to remain "unbiased" on the issue of whether or not to permit one more car to be built?
Would you find it laudable if a man who knew for a fact that man-made global warming is a hoax to remain "unbiased" in the face of deciding whether to build a power plant in a town that desperately needs one to keep its aging population from dying in the heat waves that come every summer?