Boycotting NCSoft is neither a temper tantrum nor a particularly drastic measure. It's about as close as we can get to common sense in a consumer culture. They don't "lose face" by cancelling a game; they lose money, unless we keep giving it to them.
Incidentally, "threatening" a boycott is nothing. Actually boycott them. I'm holding off on current purchases and will not pick up any Nexon or NCSoft games for at least the next two business quarters if/when CoH goes down, and I'm really not sure after that.
You're absolutely right that losing face means absolutely nothing if we just switch to their next game to be canceled. Good customer service is meaningless if you're guaranteed to come back, or if they don't even want or particularly care about your market.
That's why I'm not expecting anything, really. We're at such a severe disadvantage that the only ways to get our way at this point is either effect their bottom line, which they've already shown to me that a property that's making money but not growing isn't good enough to effect, or implore to their kindness, which, let's be frank I'm not holding my breathe on.
Honestly unless CoH pulls through in a mostly survivable state (IE, one that my vet rewards, reward tokens, characters are mostly intact or at least accounted properly for, IE, if a CoH2 has to be made, then my level 50 guys equate to a 'free' level 50 CoH2 guy, etc), or something along those lines, I'm already in Nexon/NCSoft boycott mode as it is, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with 'punishing' them.
It's just a matter of the fact that I'm not putting money into a game of theirs that can get canned at any moment even if it's in the black. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time and money on this game over several accounts, and have gotten multiple people into this game, to have it close down, not so much because it was bleeding money and nobody wanted to buy it, but because they felt like canning it so the can make a quick buck to recover losses from their primary markets in the East, and they're probably going to sit on it even if it loses them a bit of money to sit on it just so they don't have to worry about MMO competition from it.
I'm aware that CoH was a minor thing in their grand picture, and that we were mostly a rounding error that got rounded down, but I guess I'm not confident enough in their business that I won't become tomorrow's rounding error.
It makes no economic sense, even if I don't care to punish NCSoft or Nexon, to dump more money into their games when I'm clearly not the market they want to sell to.
I mean, yeah, I'm aware that if that's what maximizes their shareholder's profits and whatever, then that's their right and all, but I guess what maximizes my own profits is to not dump money into something else that might go down in flames with 0 days notice.
Honestly, the first thing I did when I heard the news was set a
lifetime spending allowance on any MMO, free to play or otherwise of 60 dollars. Because if a AAA game that's making money in profits like CoH can go down, then I have even less confidence in something like Star Trek Online or Champions Online or DC Universe Online, Star Wars the Old Republic doing any real better. And I just straight up have no interest in World of Warcraft.