Author Topic: Fan Ownership, pt 2  (Read 1809 times)

jacknomind

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Fan Ownership, pt 2
« on: September 09, 2012, 10:02:09 PM »
First off, this post is NOT meant to discourage you guys.  Just remember we have to deal in facts as well as hope.

Larry did some fact-checking and money-tracing (he's the brains of our operation, I just do the heavy-word-lifting).  This is what he found.

The essence of it all appears to be as simple as this: NCsoft is owned by Nexon Co. Ltd., and Nexon has a record of only being interested in what benefits Asian gamers, and last quarter, their push was heavy East and EU.

Paragon Studios employed 80 people.  Nexon employs 3,400.  City made $800k clear profit a month.  Nexon's quarterly was $242 million, and their latest 1 of 60 MMOs registered 3 million players in China last month.  Nexon has been at a steady $1.1 to $1.2 billion dollar company for 3 years.

As big as CoH has been to us, City wasn't even a blip seen from Tokyo and Seoul.  Someone 5,000 miles away (who likely never played any game the corporation owns---and even their largest shareholder only has a 21 percent share) said "reduce North American assets," and this happened.  And with a billion people in China as a market for Nexon's free-to-play/micropayment 2D MMOs versus a highly-technical American-based 3D MMO, they saw no reason to bother (or, really, even take notice).

THIS SHOULD NOT DISCOURAGE YOU, especially from writing letters.  But I would suggest to turn the request to NCSoft to "Please consider keeping the game and Paragon Studios--or at least partial staff--running until a new buyer can be found."  there are good economic reasons for this--even at half profit because of dropped subscribers over this, $400k a month is not to be sneezed at for something you are going to sell off anyway, not to mention something you were intending to dump flat.  It's like renting out the house you intend to sell, except that the renters know they are just going to be changing landlords, not getting booted.

(Thank you, Ms. Lackey.)

Guys, every day that passes is going to erode our potential base of supporters for a fundraiser.  NCSoft knows that the property is virtually worthless in Asia.  If we want to organize an IP buy-out or licensing option, the time to act is now.

At the least, please re-double your efforts to get in touch with other publishers; show them the kotaku and massively articles, show them however you can all the support we've given this project.

In particular, I'm looking for contact information for Turbine/Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment (their parent company).  Here's Turbine's Twitter... still digging for a non-customer-service email or phone number.

https://twitter.com/turbine

Olantern

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Re: Fan Ownership, pt 2
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2012, 11:18:45 PM »
My thanks to Ms. Lackey and Mr. Dixon for looking into this.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, if we-the-players are going to have purchase this thing, an entity to hold the rights needs to be set up.  Someone with some business experience needs to look into this sooner rather than later.

Someone also needs to get in touch with the (ex-)Paragon Studios folks and see what their plans are, if possible.  Part of the problem with this whole situation is that much of what's going on is perforce secret.

See the Legal Considerations thread for still more issues.