Well, as I said, I am not really qualified to evaluate this info other than plugging numbers into spreadsheets and making assumptions. One figure I came up with based on those links was calculated as follows:
The total subs in the industry in 2009 was 19 million. CoH's subs in 2009 was 125,000. Making the simplifying assumption that fraction of subs equals fraction of market value, you come up with about 10 1/2 million dollars as the market value of City of Heroes in 2009. There are so many things wrong with that method that I wince to report the number, but there it is.
Using other similar uninformed guesstimates, you can come up with figures ranging from 8 million or so up to about 40 million. HOWEVER, all these numbers assume that you are buying the viable company & franchise as it existed prior to Black Friday. I haven't a clue how to evaluate what laying off the entire studio and announcing you're closing the property down does to the sale value... but it won't be pretty. Discounting 50% for the damage done by NCsoft's haste to shutter the doors wouldn't surprise me.
There's a whole industry devoted to coming up with exactly these sorts of numbers (google market valuation). A buncha fans on the net aren't going to match their numbers, admittedly, though one of the websites explaining the process admits that their numbers vary from half the sale price to as high as three times. So given some hard data to work from, we can probably derive a figure someplace in the same sort of range as the pros, even though real investors would laugh themselves silly at how we got there.
What I am seeing so far, anyway, is that VV's 10 million or so sounds a lot more reasonable to me than some of the 50 or 100 million numbers I've seen thrown around. That's just crazy talk. The big kids on the block are worth that kinda money or way more in some cases - at today's prices Activision/Blizzard has about 13 billion dollars worth of stock outstanding. ($11.84 * 1,122,866,712 shares = $13,294,741,870.08) But that's... uh... market capitalization, I think it's called, not the market value. But WoW has something like 100 times as many subscribers and is something of cultural phenomenon. (shrug)
We'd want to do a lot more extensive research than a few minutes googling before actually throwing money at any ownership scheme. It does appear to me at first glance that should it come to that, it would be worth spending the money to find out if it is worth spending the money to invest, if that makes sense. (grin)
