Given the recent trends of many Asian companies to repatriate their workforces, it could be that they'd rather have future titles developed on home soil.
You think that a Korean development team is going to create an American-style superhero MMO when they already know there is virtually zero Korean demand for such content? Suppose they were crazy enough to attempt it. Who does the localization for the U.S. market? Do we play the game in Korean? My proficiency with Hangul is probably considerably worse than their ability to create content that would be appealing to me. Without a team of American developers to translate and localize their game, this "secret project" would never see the light of day here.
Funny, then, that they just fired the very people who would be most capable of doing that localization. Didn't just "downsize" them, mind you---no, they liquidated them wholesale and razed their ashes into the earth.
Keep in mind that this is not a car or motorcycle we're talking about here. It's not going to exhibit easily tractable, objective engineering issues, like which side the steering wheel goes on or what the local regulatory requirements are; games like CoH are very complex interactive systems---they possess inseparable dependencies on cultural, mythological, idiomatic and linguistic traditions that may be very difficult (and not very entertaining) for "outsiders" to grasp. As a rather simplistic example, consider that Asians seem to harbor much more positive impressions of grindfests than many Americans do. This may be because grindy games are predictable in the sense that you can excel at them by brute force, I don't know. Or perhaps it simply reflects Asian educational systems, which are typically more given to repetition and rote than Western primary schools, at least in part because some Asian countries (not Korea, ironically) use the enormous Chinese idiographic character set. On the other side of the same example, twitchy first-person shooters with "insta-kill" mechanics do even more poorly there than grindfests do here. While there are exceptions, as well as a good deal of cross-over, the bias is clear enough that I simply cannot imagine that NCsoft would produce a game in Korea that they intended to sell primarily in the Western market.
Frankly, I think it's pretty clear that NCsoft put a bullet in the CoX franchise.
