Not to make a mention of that the poster feels that COH had a great long time customer base but failed in attracting new customers. So how do you attract new customers? Advertising. No advertising = No new customers.
Advertising isn't cheap. Advertising on the scale you'd need for an international MMO isn't cheap at all. Not when you're working on $10 to $12 million in revenues to begin with. And its not like there wasn't advertisement for Going Rogue or Freedom to begin with.
It didn't really dawn on me until I hobo'd around a few MMOs and read Unsub's article. I'm surprised it took me this long to realize. To put it in succinct layman's terms:
NCSoft shut down City of Heroes because the game wasn't growing. The game wasn't growing because its architecture couldn't support a Free To Play model that could compete with other games.But wait, you say, Freedom didn't fail! And probably some other things as well, so let me get to explaining in the long form.
Once, long ago in an MMO industry far away, the subscription model was king. You paid your $15 a month, you bought the expansions, and everything was good. And then we learned new words like Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and TARP. Unsub coincided the huge drop in revenues after June 2009 on Champions, remember this was also the same point where the economy hit rock bottom before the recovery.
So subs are dead, but Turbine comes along with a Free To Play model and, from all reports, they make out like bandits. More games follow suit, and the subscription model starts to look dated. Paragon releases Mission Architect and Going Rogue, but neither are able to bring their revenues back to pre-2009 numbers. Revenues are in bad shape and aren't going up, so maybe everyone else is on to something with this Free To Play thing so Paragon and NCSoft give it a shot. That's why Freedom didn't fail, in as much as it stabilized revenues and gave the game another year to live. But it didn't
grow revenues and that was always going to be a problem.
But they could've advertised more, you say! And they could've. And new gamers would've logged in to City of Heroes and found themselves locked out stuff like being able to shout and chat and access the market and access the end game. Well, alright, they could've spent money, like the $15 a month they didn't have to begin with. And there in lay the problem.
Take Cryptic, Turbine, and Arenanet for example. They all have ways to earn cash shop items and subscription benefits in-game. I can grind for dilithium in Star Trek Online and have enough Zen to buy myself a shiny new starship. I can convert gold to gems in Guild Wars 2 and buy myself another character slot. Or I wouldn't even need to grind that much, just convert enough and play the remainder out of pocket. Basically, I'm getting a discount simply for playing the game. In City of Heroes, we never had that option.
And, from the looks of it, we never could. Cryptic's original code was never designed to be able to convert to a Free To Play system and we're all well aware of just how, uh, spotty the code documentation was. In - rough estimate - two years of pre- and post-Freedom development, the only way Paragon had found out how to deliver items from the Paragon Market was through us via the mail system. There was no option to send currency back to the market. They didn't even develop an in-game cash shop, they had to source that out to a third party. That could've been NCSoft's diktat, but I'm remiss to think why they would've jumped through all those hoops if they could've put the shop in-game. I'm willing to admit I'm wrong if otherwise.
So, we had a model where freemiums could play the game, but they couldn't get the discount for playing the game that they got just about everywhere else. You want to shout and access the market, there was no alternative beyond paying for it. And if you want to access the end game which was getting half of all the new stuff added to the game, you were looking at the $15 a month you probably didn't have to begin with. This is a great system if you wanted to keep your big spenders and long-term customers happy, and we're all well aware how well Paragon was able to do so. For new gamers who didn't have much in the way of money to spend, however, uh, they got the short end of the stick. And gamers being gamers and most of them not tied to the superhero genre, they went the path of lesser resistance. And City of Heroes trucked along, but it was unable to grow. And NCSoft, obviously, didn't approve. And here we are. :/
EDIT: And I could throw in another paragraph or two about the Pay 4 Power trend in MMOs and how Paragon was stuck behind that curve as well. That ship has sailed and it hasn't hit any icebergs yet, but there's still raw feelings about it so I'll leave it be.