No, that's how you see it, their view is different and clearly the limited view you have of "money in vs. money out" isn't the whole story. You can be mad all you want, at the end of the day, the two options are: NCSoft is batshit insane or NCSoft knows something you don't and values it more highly than whatever it is you think you know about the situation. Seriously, which one seems more likely?

As well, I'm sorry, but "IP" for a game with no actual "game" is not worth very much, if that's the case no wonder they just closed it down. But you know, trade secrets, contracts, proprietary tool chains, and who the fuck knows what else, you probably don't get to know the answer to this one and neither do I. However, reality is not always nearly as simple as you are making it out to be (if it was, System Shock 2 on GOG please).

You're right, I forgot about Elder Scrolls Online, we'll see if they make it to closed beta. I'm not really gonna count a game that got switched from MMO to non... that kind of speaks to my point, backing AAA MMOs is not a wise move these days. I don't know much about CCP Games other than that they publish EVE Online and that I don't consider them a major publisher.

If you want a "citation" for the 3 years thing, I hear Wikipedia loves those and I'll just bet you can find confirmation or a counter argument there or from a resource listed there.

Finally, success vs. failure is not what you make it out to be, in real business opportunity cost matters, if you spend 100 million on SWTOR and your ROI predictions end up being woefully optimistic, despite it pulling in enough to stay afloat, you have failed. WAR is a failure, fuck it's a failure for the playerbase, it no longer has anything at all that was promised and the revenue projections for it were utterly wrong. Failing to close the doors is the MMO equivalent of refusing to unload your stock that just got de-listed because "it's still worth something". You can do either, but either way, the stock you predicted to be worth something turned out to be worth very little and you lost your investment plus the opportunity to have invested in something far more lucrative. Warhammer Online was considered a failure back when it had 250k monthly revenue, obviously that exceeds operating costs, but it wasn't enough to get anywhere remotely close to expectations, so EA took a hit for that. You can go with your simplistic view if you want, but please quit pretending that's how companies operate, they clearly don't, even if you only know a little bit about it. You can argue it until you're blue in the face, you can argue that their methods are unsound, you can even promote change, but what matters is: that's how it currently is. So it's pointless to debate from the perspective of how you wish it was, rather than reality.

CoH is gone, almost certainly irrevocably so. It sucks, it sucks how it was done, but it "is".

Yes, that's the game. Frankly I didn't mind the repetitive gameplay and maps because it had good stories. And it's not like other MMO's aren't rehashing their gameplay over and over.

Wow, I thought that game had finished years ago, I didnt realise it was still running, I probably would have gone back periodically, I just thought (dont remember why) that it had closed down. I stopped playing a little while after CoV.

It was a good game, but not good or varied enough (for me anyway) to pay a monthly fee for.

Pity you didn't know about the F2P. I guess they didn't advertise well enough.

I hope he doesn't talk about the sky being black, or the spice girls being spicy :/ could be offensive to the black people and indians ....

Seriously.. context is everything so let's avoid being suceptible for the sake of being suceptible.

SS2 could go on sale any day if the IP holders were willing but the stupid insurance company that owns it doesn't want a profit share it wants an up front payment (basically it wants you to buy all of SS2 off them not an ongoing profit stream)

As for AAA mmo's you have... The redo of final fantasy 14(it's a completely different game so I'd count it), Actiblizz's new mmo (project titan or something?) and everquest 3..

Yes, The only reason I found out about Lineage 2 being F2P was that I was going to go back and resub, I was delighted to find it had gone f2p.

As I had subbed to both games in the past, it's a shame that old subscribers wern't emailed about the f2p status. I certainly got no notifications.

No they bought it completely thats part of whycryptic had to build a new engine for champions (kinda like COX but I miss the villains and lack of numbers) and STO

Look, it's already been explained in this thread and elsewhere on these forums that I've been going through a great deal of shit lately and was highly charged when I posted that response. Am I not allowed to have a bad day? Everyone has them ;) I'm usually not so sensitive...

Sorry for the late response - it's been an interesting week, in the Chinese proverb sort of way. But anyway. The only way I can make sense of that argument is if I hinge on some sort of, frankly, ridiculous premise that even though NCsoft has to all observable evidence made a decision that harms it, that can't possibly be the case because no sane business would do that. That kind of "business knows best" approach completely rejects the very idea that someone within NCsoft could have made a wrong decision - one with consequences they didn't expect. Business aren't supercomputers - at the end of the day, every decision made or implemented on any level is made by a human being, and people make mistakes. Here's a couple of scenarios, if you will.

"We posted a quarterly loss for the first time in our history? Oh crap, the shareholders are coming our way, quick, look decisive!!" {and if that was the case, it didn't help}

"We'll be releasing Guild Wars 2 and Blade and Soul in a couple of weeks, but we could use to boost their numbers. If we axe that City of Heroes game, that should help. They're NCsoft customers, after all, they'll move to another NCsoft game." The IP is the game. We're not talking just about the trademarks, but the entire code and graphics base as well - pretty much everything except the hardware, office space and the playerbase. NCsoft itself bought City of Heroes from Cryptic Studios that exact same way, in fact, with everything but the game engine license which was in turn granted in perpetuity. IP is goods that can be bought, sold or licensed as the parties see fit and selling or licensing it is something that can only gain them revenue.

You can try to argue that they closed down CoH in order to reinvest some of the resources, but there's next to nothing to recoup. Nearly all of the costs of maintaining a MMO are services - development, customer service, etc., which can't exactly be recycled. The same goes for the developer expertise and experience, since they were fired, rather than reassigned, and so on. Even without the PR suicide, this move has been fiscally unconscionable.

And finally, as to your insistence that we simply give up and move on, the only answer I'm willing to give you is "no, you move". It's an uphill battle, and almost hopeless one - we have, and keep investing both effort, emotions and money into fighting for its survival because for everyone involved, the improbability of succeeding is still far preferable to the certainty of failure. Despite the odds, this is what we do.

I am surprised that no one brought up the somewhat interesting looking "Champions Online". As a game that had a F2P model from the get go, developed by the same team as your precious CoH, intended BLATANTLY to be a successor to it, you would think many of the CoH players would have jumped ship.

I mean, you have to know, just as a mature, intelligence citizen of the world that any sort of media franchise goes to shit after it's original creators leave and are replaced by some money seeking entity looking to capitalize. See the Alien and Saw film "series", Call of Duty, etc.

Developed by the same company, not the same team. The majority of the people (think the ones who didn't could be counted on one hand, but don't recall specific numbers) who were at Cryptic and responsible for the creation of CoH came over to Paragon Studios when NCSoft bought the property.

CO was also not a F2P to start. It only went that in 2011.