The reason I'm more willing to buy the anonymous source's story is because the 'response' to the story in itself contains 2 lies. One, if the game was unprofitable as long as it was, then sun setting the game would have been a lot more gradual and they wouldn't be ramping up production on new Issues like every 2 months, and it also contains the ridiculous lie that nobody 'suitable' tried to buy the game.
At NO point did they try to save money on the game. They didn't cut it down to a skeleton crew or slow down on publishing Issues. That sort of thing a sane person would do to slow down the bleeding of the game, for the supposed several years it was unprofitable?
They're ridiculous.
Agreed.
Look at shutdowns that have gone in the past. Many of the companies have found it profitable and acceptable to pare down resources but leave the servers running until populations are much MUCH smaller than ours were. This is a community-centric approach that lets the community continue to experience the game as long as the company isn't losing money. Updates may be slower/fewer, but the servers stay on. Many MMOs last a very long time in that.
What causes a more abrupt shutdown of an MMO?* Licensing issues. Look at SWG. The Lucasarts license expired. Lucasarts kept the license renewed until the new star wars mmo flagship was about to launch, but then terminated it. Even then, SWG's population was measurably smaller by all metrics and I'd heard jokes that internally SOE's SWG dev team had been pared down so much it was sometimes jokingly said the next step would be "the intern under the stairs."
For CoH, the IP wouldn't be an issue, but there may have been other licensing expenses. NCSoft's account management systems and the CoH marketplace were both middleware components that would likely be licensed rather than purchased. It could be that the way the fees were determined, they were costlier when applied to the CoH business model (for example). if poorly negotiated, there could be all sorts of agreements that have unforseen costs.
* Performance issues. This is what NCSoft used to justify TabulaRasa & AutoAssault, for example. Both were killed quickly after launch. On the back-end, both contained significant performace/stability issues that required much more resources to keep them afloat.... even if they cut all new content development to the bone, they just would require too many resources and/or too much development time chasing bugs to make things work. True or not, that explains an abrupt shutdown.
For CoH, this is anything BUT likely. From everything we know, CoH was lean, stable, and streamlined rather well in this regard.
* Platform issues. I've experienced this personally- Worked on maintaining a product that we *had to* retire. It relied on 3rd party components that only worked on an older server OS and the security risks of that older server OS meant we HAD TO upgrade. Retiring the product was less operationally painful than trying to get it running on the new OS with custom-made parts.
For CoH, I rate this is "unlikely"-- its possible-- this was the original dev team's first foray into mmo's so they may have unwittingly "painted themselves into a few corners" when it came to platform, portability, and upgradability, but I've neither seen nor heard any hint of such issues on CoH.
*Ego Although I listed Tabula Rasa under performance, I believe that its shutdown was more driven by ego. NCsoft loves a blockbuster. They were HUGE in Asia and hoped to have proportional success in the US market. They hired a legend, gave him a blank check for his "blank slate" and expected great things that never arrived. It was an embarrassment.
What would MORE embarrassing and damaging to ego would be a near-pullout of the US/Euro market. At the time, with so little working for them, CoH was a small-but-stable anchor that gave them a face-saving example of success in the western market. It didn't fit with their current lineup. It didn't fit with their internal philosophy. It didn't reflect what they wanted to do or be, but it could be pointed to as a financial success, given the money they invested into it and the return they got. Once GWII came out- something closer to their styles and philosophies, but still uniquely catered to western likings- they had something they could point to as one of their own... more or less... then, they could finally cut away that redheaded stepchild CoH. I consider this "more likely than the other reasons given.
* Finally, there's Resources One thing that bugged me when rumors of buyers being snubbed was the "why?" Well, any sale would likely have included the provision that NCSoft continue operations of CoH until hosting and account management could be transferred to a compatible system, and that meant keeping those resources locked up on CoH servers.
What if they had already planned a use for those resources?
City of Heroes runs on virtual servers, but those servers have very real resources allocated to them. Launching a new title in a new market requires a HUGE investment in new server resources... or you repurpose ones you already have. Killing a less-profitable product that doesn't fit your design philosophies with one you hope will rake in the money (NCSoft is constantly shooting for blockbusters) so you can use their resources seems logical to the businessman that doesn't think much of its customer base.
NCSoft was preparing for a Blade & Soul launch in the US not long after the server resources would be freed from the CoH shutdown. That would offset some of the cost of the B&S launch. Having a profitable launch is both about reducing costs AND decent sales. Given that NCSoft's track record in bringing their asian titles to the US, making this launch as cost-effective as possible may have been very critical to the egos (see above) of well-placed people.... people that couldn't allow those CoH resources to remain locked away. This is purely conjecture, but mostly due to my own experience, I find it to be plausible conjecture.
