But that's not the case with CoH. There's been no bad blood, no reason to save face, no reason...for anything at all really. The game wasn't costing the company money, it wasn't an advertising/marketing sink, it wasn't going to imminently collapse...there seemed every reason for Kim to continue supporting CoH as he had done before - one might even say more reason to carry on that support, because unlike Tabula Rasa, there'd been no high profile game development delay/lower than expected subs/game closure/court case fiasco attached.
There
is, at least to my perception, a strong issue of face in the closing of CoH. The style of MMO that is popular in Korea is almost the complete antithesis of City of Heroes -- they virtually
require grouping for most of the advancement, players can expect to farm encounters over and over again for a single rare or ultra-rare drop that only
that encounter gives, and you are on a continual cycle of replacing your gear with better gear as you level, because things you had at level 1 are useless against level 50 mobs. And NCSoft keeps bringing these types of game to the Western market. They experience an initial rush of players interested in the "new shiny", which tapers off as people become frustrated with how much grinding it takes to get any significant advancement.
Meanwhile, over here, we've got City of Heroes. It's not a blockbuster -- a superhero MMO is a niche market among the endless variations on fantasy. And it died badly in Korea because the players didn't like it. But it's been going along in the Western market, turning a reasonably steady profit.
And
because it continues to succeed, however modestly, while the Korean-style MMOs that NCSoft brings to the Western market lose popularity and die, CoH has become an
embarrassment to NCSoft. Essentially, with the MMOs that NCSoft has brought to the Western market only to see them fail, NCSoft is going the same thing over and over again in the hope that the result will be different
this time. And with them also running another game that
is a success, while being almost the polar opposite of the games they keep pushing at the Western market, it demonstrates their lack of
nunchi -- their inability or unwillingness to see and respond to what the Western market wants in an MMO.
By killing City of Heroes, NCSoft removes a gigantic zit on their face. With CoH gone, NCSoft can continue to bring one Korean-style MMO after another to the Western market, and if they don't succeed, NCSoft can use the convenient fiction that it's the
subject of the game, not the
content and
play style, that is making them fail. All NCSoft has to do is find the right
subject for an MMO, and the Western market will fall in love with it and flock to it in droves, and they'll recognize the inherent superiority of the Korean-style MMO and branch out to playing NCSoft's other MMOs.
And if NCSoft
sells City of Heroes, now that they've cancelled it, they stand to lose even
more face -- if the company that buys it increases the profits, then it makes NCSoft look stupid for having sold a profitable fproperty.
