Oh, I wasn't dismissing the possibility that he was in South America, was just saying his name sounds Italian. Wondered if that's his origin. I had never heard anything in regards to his location myself.
I maintain that NCSoft thoroughly failed City of Heroes as a publisher and I believe the game still had a lot of untapped market potential. For a game that was nearly a decade old, whose general enjoyment factor completely dwarfs anything else in my game library(it's not a small library), the general public's knowledge of City of Heroes existence is obscure at the very best. FatherXmas has already said I wasn't going to get my CoH tv spots but I can't be convinced that it was outside of NCSoft's budget to have a short commercial made for every Issue and I firmly believe they would have had a return on such an investment.
You know, if they had any clue what they were doing, that is.
It may have been outside of Paragon Studios budget but we now know that, next to their sibling subsidiaries, they received the bare bones minimum of support.
There's no reason CoH couldn't have taken a bigger chunk out of WoW's playerbase, that game has nothing going for it except addictive gameplay(for some). I tried World of Warcraft twice. Once back in 2006, before I was set in my CoH ways, I rolled a character and played for all of 7 minutes until I was struck with the most overwhelming sensation to go play outside because life is too short. Fortunately it went away once I logged in to City of Heroes and I assured my family that an ambulance was unnecessary. I tried it again this past December. While searching for something to take my mind off of how much I miss someone, I came across the copy of WoW I received as a gift and realised I had never actually used the free month that came with it, I recalled that I tried the game using a friend's account. I once again put myself through that laughable excuse for a character creator and upon popping out the other side in the middle of a crowd of 9 other players that looked almost exactly like me, I logged out and uninstalled the game immediately with no regrets. I'm certain I'm not the only person that experienced something along these lines and yet the name World of Warcraft is recognized today by even the most game illiterate person. CoH; not so much.
There's another franchise CoH could easily have taken a bite out of and not just any franchise, the one that can boast having the best selling pc game of all time; The Sims. Between CoH's character creator and base builder, there's no reason CoH shouldn't have enjoyed a fair amount of crossover from that playerbase, especially after The Sims Online was shutdown.
The thing about City of Heroes is, even though it, at first glance, appears to be a niche game that mainly caters to superhero enthusiasts and MMO players, its accessibility goes FAR beyond most any game out there. I cannot count the number of times I encountered an instance of "My wife/girlfriend/sister/daughter/etc. saw me playing it, tried it and got hooked." It's kind of natural for boys to be attracted to a game of CoH's content but a game with this much potential to make gamers out of girls who never had an interest in video games deserves more credit than it has received. That was the story of the person I miss most in the world. She had no interest in video games until she saw her brother playing City of Heroes. He and I didn't see eye to eye on a number of things but I'll always be eternally grateful to him for having purchased his copy of City of Heroes(sigh, I'm going off on a tangent). Okay, the PvP needed work but the bottom line is CoH has pretty much everything one could want in a game.
According to Wikipedia:
"As with book publishers or publishers of DVD movies, video game publishers are responsible for their product's manufacturing and marketing, including market research and all aspects of advertising."
I believe the number of missed opportunities for NCSoft to have promoted City of Heroes are countless.
I don't believe for even one second that CoH's shutdown was a result of current sales numbers but if at any point NCSoft was dissatisfied with CoH's performance; it can only be attributed to NCSoft's own ineptitude.
Arenanet seems to have recognized NCSoft's inability to find its own ass and outsourced the task of promoting that game that doesn't deserve my hatred but has it anyway(I recognize that my ire towards Anet is unfair and I'm somewhat ashamed of the hatred I possess in their regard but the fact of the matter is that, for the loss of the life that is no longer open to me and their involvement in that, I simply can never forgive Guild Wars 2 for existing).
I believe now more than ever that the people running NCSoft have absolutely no idea how to manage a company and any success that has come their way has been nothing more than the result of luck and fortunate circumstances.
