However, I think that an even more important question is: What reasons does NCsoft have to not sell City of Heroes? Because this is the question that really has me scratching my head. Are there legal issues? Of course, but are they insurmountable? Obviously not, as proven by the fact that NCsoft itself acquired complete ownership of the game in 2007 from Cryptic Studios. Is NCsoft afraid that City of Heroes will become a competitor with the company's other titles? Then hedge your risk by retaining an ownership stake in the title with no investment obligation. If it performs well, everyone wins; if it does not, NCsoft has not lost anything.
Are there other issues that are preventing the sale? If so, then tell us, and together we can figure out some way to work around it or compromise on a solution. I currently work for one of the largest IT companies in the world, and my full time is dedicated to a client who is also one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world. In my experience, there is no such thing as exhausting all possibilities in the business world. When a company wants or needs something to happen, it happens. When a company says that it has exhausted all possibilities, that means that it did not want or need it badly enough to continue trying. To me, our current status is simply that we have not yet convinced NCsoft well enough that it wants to sell City of Heroes.
I think the issue may be one of face -- the image NCSoft has of itself as a successful purveyor of online games. Look at NCSoft's games in the Korean market; there is a particular style of game that Korean players favor -- games that tend heavily to extreme amounts of grinding, the requirement for groups to be assembled to complete most of the content past the early levels, and a restricted level of reward to keep players coming back to the in-game store just to keep from falling behind the curve -- and games that don't fit that mold do extremely poorly, as evinced by the failure of CoH in Korea -- a game which is almost the antithesis of the style of MMO popular in Korea.
But City of Heroes has continued to bumble along, producing a steady but not impressive profit in the Western market, while NCSoft has brought MMOs in the Korean style to the Western market again and again, and has repeatedly seen an initial rush of players interested in the 'new shiny', then its popularity trails off as people see how bad the grind-to-reward ratio is. And there's where the issue of 'face' comes in. NCSoft brings in game after game, and their performance sags until they're closed (at least in the US/Europe), while City of Heroes keeps going; this creates the impression that NCSoft doesn't
understand the Western market, and what the players here
want in an MMO. By killing City of Heroes, they can continue to bring one Korean-style MMO after another to the Western market, and if they don't succeed, NCSoft can convince itself that it's not the
play style that's the problem, it's the
subject, and if they just find the right
background for an MMO, the Western market will instantly recognize the fundamental superiority of the Korean MMO style and play it in droves for years and years.
Selling City of Heroes sets it up to be a
perpetual thorn in their side. If it continues to go along turning a profit, however small, it's going to be out there on the MMO market as
proof that NCSoft is not competent at presenting games for the Western market -- that not only do they keep bringing game after game to the Western market, all with fundamentally the same playstyle, that the players
in that market don't like to play, but they dumped a successful game they ran that players
did like to play that was almost the complete opposite of the style of game they keep shoving down our throats, and it's still succeeding after they sold it to another company (which also shows their lack of business sense for dumping a profitable game).
