I too doubt that the figures provided were real. (its certainly possible that they are, but the evidence isn't there to back it up) However, I find it very likely that something like that went down.
Everything I have read surrounding the closure of the game and Paragon screams to me that what happened was NCSoft wanted to free up resources for Lineage and Guildwars because they were not supporting themselves; and that no one at NCSoft had any love for City of Heroes, a game which was run by a team in another country, and which had not originally been an NCSoft title. It was an easy target to kill cause it's always easier to screw someone you don't know than it is to screw the guy in the next office over.
Unfortunately, at that point, some corporate greed took over. Either someone at NCSoft said
-"No one else is going to play with my toys, even if I don't want them any more"
-or "if we sell this, we've just given ourselves new competition in the greater MMO market"
-or "every City of Heroes customer is a potential customer for lineage/guildwars, so let's force them to move"
Likely it was a combination of all three, but the first and the third are the stronest contenders in my mind. At the end of the day, they are all three weak and self-defeating lines of reasoning, but they are also the lines of reasoning that are taught every single day in business school (here I could go on a much longer rant about sociopathic thinking and circular logic in big business, but let's not do that)
So if you follow this line of reasoning it is completely possible that NCSoft would quote a figure that they know that any competitor would balk at and fans couldn't raise, just to keep the game out of someone else's hands, while still giving the appearence of good faith efforts to unload the game.
just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't really a conspiracy.
