Having read the "Press Release" from NCSoft - and had a chance to calm down and digest, and read through some of the thoughts on here, it seems to me that there are a couple of angles we can attack NCSoft with quite legitimately.
Firstly - their complete lack of communication with their market other than effectively two statements: a) we're closing a successful game and b) we're still closing this successful game, go fuck yourselves. No real press, just a poorly worded statement to say they don't care about their customers.
Secondly they are sitting on top of a massive PR disaster if we can get that word out to their shareholders, to the wider non-game press. If their shareholders start to lose confidence in the board of NCSoft there could be blood on the carpet within hours. NCSoft almost certainly don't care too much about their customers - but they do care about their shareholders - so if we can make enough stink...
Could it be they are on the ropes already? I'm not sure I buy into the the "them and us" cultural differences too much. They've been trading in the West a long time and know by now what works and what doesn't - and it's demonstrable that once NCSoft took over the reins of CoH it got much better. So to say "they don't understand that" is to seriously underestimate them. But maybe they felt that running Paragon was too much work. I suspect they took some earbending from Nexxon too. Their share acquisition and this move seem remarkably close to be coincidental. But, if the PR is too bad, maybe they can say "Nexxon made us do it" and reverse their decision or do an honourable get out.
Ok I wrote this last thing last night in the office, then took a call so had to drop it and run so these thoughts are less refined than some I've posted subsequent but might be worth thinking about.
