Blog vs anonymous source

[TigerKnight]

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.

[Kosmos]

As for salaries Tony, you may want to check this out, a salary calculator that will show you what your equivalent salary needs to be in another city.

For example, an equivalent salary in San Jose, CA if you made $25K in Austin, TX is $40.5K.  $4 million does seem a tad low.  Not outrageously so, just a tad.

I would say that article was a pretty fair assessment of the various rumors.

That's actually just a cost-of-living adjustment; it tells what your equivalent salary needs to be to maintain the same standard of living in the new city. It doesn't tell you what someone in your equivalent job position makes in that city. Unfortunately for we Californians, the two never quite seem to match up. Also, I doubt many of the Paragon staff could afford to live in San Jose, let alone Mountain View; most probably commuted from further out.

Anyway, I agree that $4 million for Paragon seems a tad low to me, but could be accurate if a significant number of the 80 staff commonly cited were clerical, part-time or intern positions.

[End Sinister]

I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.

I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.

C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.

I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.

[dwturducken]

The other thing to take into account with a cost of living number is that it's been a generation since the average household had just one income.

[UruzSix]

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.

[Sajaana]

It never ceases to amaze me how people who say they love these MMORPGs, and promote the format, are so quick to take the side of the publisher against the fans.  It's like a beaten wife making excuses for her husband, or a crack addict making excuses for his dealer.

Was it profitable?  Was it not profitable?  The very fact that such questions make a difference to us shows why this entire premise on which this industry is built is flawed.  How can people like you and I--everyone on these boards--take responsibility for profitability?  We can't, yet we are held accountable as if we can, because our good things are taken away from us, while the seller's good things remain locked away.

[UruzSix]

Was it profitable?  Was it not profitable?  The very fact that such questions make a difference to us shows why this entire premise on which this industry is built is flawed.

Uh, its that premise that gives us video games to begin with.

[Sajaana]

Uh, its that premise that gives us video games to begin with.

There's a pile of playable Sega cartridges in my closet that testifies to the contrary.

[LadyVamp]

There's a pile of playable Sega cartridges in my closet that testifies to the contrary.

That pile of playable cartridges doesn't consume power 24/7 and doesn't require a technical support staff to answer questions and help stuck players.

[Quinch]

You want to shout and access the market, there was no alternative beyond paying for it.

And you could use tells and broadcasts by paying as little as five dollars once, as well as actually using the stuff you bought with those five dollars. Keep in mind that the initial free-to-play model - the 2-week trial accounts - did ship with unrestricted communication.

It's a fair guess, I think, that the freem channel restrictions weren't implemented to lock them out, but to avoid a repeat of the Days of Spam.

[Sajaana]

That pile of playable cartridges does consume power 24/7 and doesn't require a technical support staff to answer questions and help stuck players.

If there was indeed a bill to keep the servers on, we certainly never knew how much, and they certainly never gave us an option to pay for it.

And as far as technical support is concerned, most of that was automated anyway.  Why is it that we can find technical support in non-online games in threads and wikis even now, long after the games were published?  Besides, we did a pretty good job of doing that on our own with the Paragon Wiki.

We seem to think that the need for a live team justifies the publisher's right to take away the things we buy.  I think we give these scummy publishers too much credit.  Instead, it's the need for the publisher's right to take away the things we buy that justifies the live team.  They want us dependent on them.

[Quinch]

Also keep in mind that it's unlikely that the GMs only deal with one game - thus, it's not like there was a gaggle of idle CoH GMs chatting around the cooler while waiting for CoH-specific assistance requests. Furthermore, any CoH petitions were funded by CoH's own subscribers, as VIP players were the only tier entitled to GM support - freems and preems had to make do with unofficial assistance.

[Ironwolf]

I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.

I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.

C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.

I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.

This forum has one purpose - Save or Restore City of Heroes.

If you don't agree with our purpose, please politely leave and let us pursue our efforts unmolested. You aren't saving us, waking us up, doing us a favor or any other so called "noble" effort on your part. We know the chances of success and we know the costs of failure. The cost of failure is higher than we want to pay.

We are not delusional, we have seen all of the games currently on offer and they are completely inferior in every way to CoH. I can play a super-jumping robotic legged experimentally tweaked Guppy with retractable claws in CoH - no where else in the world is that possible.

[Minotaur]

I've never been one to possess a popular opinion, even while the City Of Heroes forums were still up, but I had said it before and I'll say it again: City Of Heroes going free-to-play was a last ditch effort by Paragon Studios to keep the game afloat before subscription numbers dropped to an unsustainable number. I remember having posts deleted by moderators about this on the official forums several times because I had guessed correctly about internal decisions. I had been accused by mods. of breaking E.U.L.A.'s and whatnot when I never did anything of the sort. Logically, despite how Paragon Studios kicked it, there is no other explanation why the studio would have taken a risk on such an uncertain and unproven payment model. Free-to-play games always have an initial influx of cash in the beginning, but as time has worn on those payment models are beginning to show signs of unsustainability/failure.

I think that the blogger of Unsubject makes a very unbiased point and just because people on this forum disagree with him does not make what he says any less true. C.O.H. year on year was hemorrhaging money and our beloved game's closure was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been lurking on cohtitan.com for months now since the game's closure and my suggestion is to move on. The only reason I keep coming back here myself is to see if people really do have the gumption to pull off an independently created project. I think that such a project without proper funding and management is doomed for failure, however.

C.O.H. is not coming back. In the least, it's not coming back anytime soon; I mean maybe just under a decade from now.

I miss City Of Heroes and I miss playing with all of the friendly people I had met through it, but in the end it was just a game. I think people that read and post in this forum need to realize that and move on.

But if this was true, and I don't believe it was, why wouldn't NCSoft just pocket the $8-10M they could have had as pure profit and sold it on ? They could then have forgotten about the game having got back what they paid for it.

I happen to believe the $4M/year was just the CoH expenses (not much more than 1/3 of PS staff were on CoH) and PS about broke even despite 2/3 of the staff working on something that hadn't generated a cent yet. There is also the dodgy accounting question in that there was a strong suspicion that points bought but not yet spent were credited to NCSoft and only switched over to CoH when they were spent, I know I had $50+ of unspent points at the end so the last year's revenue figures were probably artificially low.

[UruzSix]

And you could use tells and broadcasts by paying as little as five dollars once, as well as actually using the stuff you bought with those five dollars. Keep in mind that the initial free-to-play model - the 2-week trial accounts - did ship with unrestricted communication.

It's a fair guess, I think, that the freem channel restrictions weren't implemented to lock them out, but to avoid a repeat of the Days of Spam.

True, but again the only route to get those rights was by spending $5. Not everyone who wants to play is going to have that $5 right now, or in the immediate future. Put in a Paragon Points exchange and now you've given those players a carrot and cut the spammers off at the knees.

[UruzSix]

If there was indeed a bill to keep the servers on, we certainly never knew how much, and they certainly never gave us an option to pay for it.

And as far as technical support is concerned, most of that was automated anyway.  Why is it that we can find technical support in non-online games in threads and wikis even now, long after the games were published?  Besides, we did a pretty good job of doing that on our own with the Paragon Wiki.

We seem to think that the need for a live team justifies the publisher's right to take away the things we buy.  I think we give these scummy publishers too much credit.  Instead, it's the need for the publisher's right to take away the things we buy that justifies the live team.  They want us dependent on them.

Oh, its this argument again. Yeah, uh, good luck and godspeed.

[UruzSix]

I happen to believe the $4M/year was just the CoH expenses (not much more than 1/3 of PS staff were on CoH) and PS about broke even despite 2/3 of the staff working on something that hadn't generated a cent yet. There is also the dodgy accounting question in that there was a strong suspicion that points bought but not yet spent were credited to NCSoft and only switched over to CoH when they were spent, I know I had $50+ of unspent points at the end so the last year's revenue figures were probably artificially low.

I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.

That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.

[Minotaur]

I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.

That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.

TR was different, they stabbed that in the front by forcibly Koreanizing it before release and causing it to fall between the Korean and US stools, and then surprise surprise, they found it didn't make money, it was too Korean for the west and not Korean enough for the east.

[Aggelakis]

Furthermore, any CoH petitions were funded by CoH's own subscribers, as VIP players were the only tier entitled to GM support - freems and preems had to make do with unofficial assistance.

Incorrect. Freem and preem could get assistance through email and website. VIPs could get assistance through email, website, and in-game.

[MakoMako]

I believe City of Heroes was profitable. I believe Paragon was most likely profitable even with staff dedicated to the second project.

That said, NCSoft knew that CoX was at best holding ground, they might not have had good confidence in the second project, and all told they felt their resources could get a better return on other projects like Wildstar. Cold and mercenary, I know, but we should've known that since Tabula Rasa.

As much as we love pointing at how Tabula Rasa was cut, it was a proven flop of a game by comparison. The only thing bad about what happened there was that NCSoft committed fraud by forging a resignation when there was no such thing.

Not so much cold as it was a business necessity. What happened with CoH doesn't compare much.