yet all their reports show aion pulling in more money than CoH.
CoH was pulling about two times what Guild Wars 1 was pulling (look at NCSoft reports.) Why is Guild Wars 1 still running then?
CoH costs exponentially more to run, always did. plus when both were in their earning primes there was a dimensional gap between what they pulled in in GW's favor.
CoH did NOT have a high retention rate, that is why the servers were merged, because of the LOW POPULATIONS. Their forums were filled with complaints about how the game was losing too many players and they were ASKING for the servers to be merged to help with the population problems.
That alone is enough to debunk what this person was saying as nothing more than a disgruntled employee...or fan, pretending to be one.
There was NEVER a server merger in CoH. You may be thinking about the consolidation of all servers into a single data-warehouse hosted in the US, before that EU players were forced to play on servers that had their own datacenter, without any ability to ever roll a character to play with US friends. The merger allowed people to play in any server from any region, that was all that ever "merged."
This alone is reason to debunk your grasp on the game, you don't even realize that servers never merged yet pretend to know the community's feel?
yet all their reports show aion pulling in more money than CoH.
CoH was pulling about two times what Guild Wars 1 was pulling (look at NCSoft reports.) Why is Guild Wars 1 still running then?
Why kill a title that linked (as in gave some bonuses in Guild wars 2 for completing stuff in Guild Wars 1) to the sequel that was recently released?
Does this mean that NCsoft/Arenanet *wont* shut down Guild Wars? Who knows, but I am not expecting to stay around forever. In fact, Arenanet quite possibly have more *power* with NCsoft than Paragon Studios ever did.
I personally give Guild Wars 1 another year or 2 before it gets shuttered, if it does get shuttered, or Arenanet depart from the NCsoft stable (and to be fair, it does look like they could fairly easily do that, seeing as Arenanet now manage the Guild Wars 2 accounts themselves (or at least that is the impression that the NCsoft Master account page gives... Guild Wars 2 doesn't appear on it).
I am going to be intrigued by the upcoming financials (should be released soonish from what I can remember)
Originally posted by Grakulen Guild Wars 1 costs could be next to nothing meaning it has a higher proffit margin.
yep. 20 million dollars invested in 2000.....team of ~30 employees as of ship...sales in excess of 7m and a cash shop. CoH probably had 6x the wages to be paid, cost of what was considered AAA back then, bad retention, much lower sales.
Originally posted by Grakulen Guild Wars 1 costs could be next to nothing meaning it has a higher proffit margin.
GW1 still has a dev team. Hosting costs are "nothing" for everyone involved Removing CoH servers didn't save any money. MMOs are expensive to maintain if you run only one, the more you run, the less impact each has, because the real overhead is on paying for the datacenter that you need whether you have one game or 20. In fact, closing CoH simply increases the effective hosting cost of all other games that remain live, GW1 included
Also, given the intense level of development sunk into GW2, ArenaNet was heavily on the red for a long time
Paragon Studios had a 80 man team, but about half that team was dedicated to that LostCraft MMO.
CoH did NOT have a high retention rate, that is why the servers were merged, because of the LOW POPULATIONS. Their forums were filled with complaints about how the game was losing too many players and they were ASKING for the servers to be merged to help with the population problems.
That alone is enough to debunk what this person was saying as nothing more than a disgruntled employee...or fan, pretending to be one.
Ho boy, you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
First off, the servers were never merged - the server lists were merged. Originally, NA and EU servers operated on separate lists - the game was the same, but a player with an EU version of the game couldn't play on the US servers, and vice versa. Eventually they were desegregated - that was the "merge".
Originally posted by Rthuth434
Originally posted by Akais
I'm inclined to think of this as an issue or profit margin rather than profit as well.
NCSoft has a history of axing games that don't trend to their expectations when it comes to profit margin.
What I don't entirely understand is why the game couldn't get sold.
It seems silly to me that NCSoft would turn down any potential profits able to be realized with the sale of a game with an installed and rather loyal fanbase. There are tons of companies that would pay handsomely for this. Likewise, the IP is so niche that it's highly unlikely NCSoft will ever use it again constructively.
...what if EA was looking to buy? i'd rathjer kill it then and most would agree. seriously couldn't have been any decent company looking to take it on. would you want to see a company like Ubisoft or Microsoft run a mmo again?
The main goal of the #savecoh movement is to get the game sold to a responsible owner. Selling to EA would be a Pet Cemetary scenario.
Originally posted by Gishgeron
Originally posted by erictlewis
I sit here and wonder, if the game was truly making a profit then why shut it down. Usually you only shut down a game that is going down the toilet. In case we had a few games this year that should have been closed but are still going.
So I am left to wonder why they did this as from what I could tell there were making a profit. So that leads to other questions to why.
Simply making a profit is not enough, thats why. Your overhead is going to increase each year. If the game is already on a downward trend, and you have exhausted all your options to try and pull it back into an upward trend, then you have to make choices. It WAS profitable. It was getting less profitable each year, while the cost to maintain it was going up. Before the game began to leech money from other ends of their company, they closed it. This way they could use that money to help something else, instead of the other way around.
Are you familiar with the term "maintenance mode"? Very few businesses - and MMOs almost never - simply pull the plug at the first time of trouble. You get warning signs - updates slow down, servers merge, layoffs - CoH had none of that. One week, a brand new powerset and an expansion in open beta. The next day, everybody's fired.
Originally posted by niceguy3978 I could be wrong, but isn't this the first time that NCSoft has come right out and said that the game was not profitable? Before it seemed like it was just inferred from the fact that the game was shutting down.
Yep - not to mention they also said it when the game was slowly turning a profit, as it was the case with Tabula Rase which, while not the breakout hit they were hoping for, was still slowly paying itself off. If briefly.
Originally posted by Rthuth434
the game was NOT profitable. they were paying more in wages alone than the game pulled in for a few years now
Check NCsoft's own revenue reports. Either that's not true, or NCsoft paid the developers as though they were its own execs.
{hint: it's the first}
Originally posted by Volkanik
I really don't understand the need for the continual dissection of why City of Heroes was closed down. Look at the player number figures from around Q3 of 2009 and you'll see a steady trend downward. It was an old game that people gradually stopped playing. Simple as that.
This is a point of contention - and a lopsided one, too. I'm not sure if you've been around since Freedom hit, but going F2P drew in a LOT of new and old players. It was also more profitable, as evidenced by a much faster rate of content expansion, from costumes to new issues.
Originally posted by Alphamojo I'm akin to believe they didn't want to fund CoH in light of their newer MMO's coming out, as it's resources could be put forth to maintaining the newer ones.
Except CoH wasn't recycled - everyone was fired and the IP sequestered. There was no attempt at all to reuse any element of the franchise, either from personnell or code.
Originally posted by Grakulen Guild Wars 1 costs could be next to nothing meaning it has a higher proffit margin.
GW1 still has a dev team. Hosting costs are "nothing" for everyone involved. Removing CoH servers didn't save any money. MMOs are expensive to maintain if you run only one, the more you run, the less impact each has, because the real overhead is on paying for the datacenter that you need whether you have one game or 20. In fact, closing CoH simply increases the effective hosting cost of all other games that remain live, GW1 included.
Also, given the intense level of development sunk into GW2, ArenaNet was heavily on the red for a long time.
GW2 has already made up the cost of its production.
The European servers were merged with the American servers because of LOW POPULATION ISSUES. They had to open the game up so all players around the world could chose to play with those in other areas. Even their own WIKI shows 9 of the 15 servers with LOW populations even AFTER the world merging of servers.
And YES, it is a MERGER...even THEY called it one.
Right here on this very site as well as others there is an article that in Sept of 2008 City of Heroes had 125,000 subscribers, according to a press release by Paragon.
125,000 x 14.99 per month = $1,873,750 x 12 months = 22,485,000
As SAID BY THE PERSON TELLING US THEY RETAINED 95%+ of its subscribers yet at the same time told us it made $12,000,000.
12 million is NOT 95-98% of 22.4 million.
This person is a flat out LIAR, I dont CARE if the game was GOOD or not or deserved to be shut down or NOT...he is a liar.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
The European servers were merged with the American servers because of LOW POPULATION ISSUES. They had to open the game up so all players around the world could chose to play with those in other areas. Even their own WIKI shows 9 of the 15 servers with LOW populations even AFTER the world merging of servers.
And YES, it is a MERGER...even THEY called it one.
Right here on this very site as well as others there is an article that in Sept of 2008 City of Heroes had 125,000 subscribers, according to a press release by Paragon.
125,000 x 14.99 per month = $1,873,750 x 12 months = 22,485,000
As SAID BY THE PERSON TELLING US THEY RETAINED 95%+ of its subscribers yet at the same time told us it made $12,000,000.
12 million is NOT 95-98% of 22.4 million.
This person is a flat out LIAR, I dont CARE if the game was GOOD or not or deserved to be shut down or NOT...he is a liar.
Ummmmm.....no it was not a merger. In fact they created a new VIP server, and just added the European servers to the main list. No server was merged with another.
The European servers were merged with the American servers because of LOW POPULATION ISSUES. They had to open the game up so all players around the world could chose to play with those in other areas. Even their own WIKI shows 9 of the 15 servers with LOW populations even AFTER the world merging of servers.
You do realize {wishful thinking, I know} that every time the idea of merging the servers was brought up in the forums, it was collectively shouted down by nearly everyone else, to the point that rather than go through it again, it was usually met with a boilerplate response of "no, and here are the reasons why". The server lists were merged for player convenience, and to streamline the game clients with the new NCsoft launcher application. And finally, the low-population servers were that way intentionally - a lot of players liked the "small town" feel of the smaller servers, while the rest congregated on Virtue, Freedom and Union.
The European servers were merged with the American servers because of LOW POPULATION ISSUES. They had to open the game up so all players around the world could chose to play with those in other areas. Even their own WIKI shows 9 of the 15 servers with LOW populations even AFTER the world merging of servers.
And YES, it is a MERGER...even THEY called it one.
Server LIST merger. Not Server Merger. Don't play dumb, you know "server merger due to low population" means to merge populations of two individual servers, and that was never done.
And "Low" was not empty, I played in one of the "emptiest" servers and it was very active. All servers went through a lot of upgrades over the years, with Freedom getting the biggest upgrade. Servers basically reported LOW at the stress level where they reported MEDIUM at launch.
And "Low" was not empty, I played in one of the "emptiest" servers and it was very active. All servers went through a lot of upgrades over the years, with Freedom getting the biggest upgrade. Servers basically reported LOW at the stress level where they reported MEDIUM at launch.
Small correction, contention, whatever you'd care to call it - I doubt any individual server got an upgrade. Nowadays virtualization is the name of the game - a game server isn't a physical box anymore, but a virtual machine in a much larger server pool, with resources allocated to it on the fly, so the upgrade of the game servers increased the amount of resources each game shard had.
Originally posted by Rthuth434 @ ;cmgangrel: it's just a sloppy web page. NCSoft master account is linked to GW2 once you sign in the support page.
I never had to log into my NCsoft account page to buy the game. In fact, you *can* play Guild Wars 2 without having an NCsoft account.
Does this mean that if you never have to use the support page (which I haven't), then it will never be linked up to an NCsoft master account?
if you go to their gw2 customer support page you have to log in with your ncsoft master account, or create one if you don't have it. furthermore, once you've linked a GW account to the GW2 account, if you change your GW2 log in info, your GW1 account changes to that info.
yea if you never use their CS you won't be bothered to make/link account for ncsoft...but if you do you will.
@jtcgs The source is not a Liar. Take 22 and multiply it by.95 and see how long it takes you to get to 12. It will take you 11 times to reach 12.51.If that retention number is Quarter over Quarter it matches up perfectly from 2009-2012 quarterly performance.
Originally posted by TheQuinchSmall correction, contention, whatever you'd care to call it - I doubt any individual server got an upgrade. Nowadays virtualization is the name of the game - a game server isn't a physical box anymore, but a virtual machine in a much larger server pool, with resources allocated to it on the fly, so the upgrade of the game servers increased the amount of resources each game shard had.
In a VM environment you still can assign maximum resources to each individual virtual machine. It was publicly noted long ago Freedom had higher limits than any other server due to it's popularity.
CoH DID NOT have a 95% retention rate let's be VERY clear about that - that information is easily accessed. CoH was running at approx 25% of it's peak subscriber base at the end.
Total operating cost of 4 million - you're kidding right? Competing against Google in Mountain View...and you think 50k a year is high for a developer??? Try LOW.
There is absolutely NO ONE on RECORD stating they offered 80 million to purchase CoH - What kind of fool would? EVEN IF all the other numbers were correct and EVERY player remained VIP that would take 10 YEARS JUST to recoup costs. All you have for this 80 million offer is yet ANOTHER anonymous source.
NCSoft valuation of CoH @ 3 million for tax purposes; funny since NCSoft has not even filed their tazes yet...how would this ANONYMOUS source know this?
The only thing this anonymous source got correct was this: NCSoft tried to work with Paragon, they really did. But the profits were not what they needed to be, and CoH/Paragon were the weak link in NCsoft's lineup moving forward.
I love how the anonymous source didn't try to claim no one at Paragon saw this coming; like they claimed in the beginning ... since both Matt Miller and Melissa Bianco have admitted they knew approximately 2 months before the announcement.
If this anonymous source stands behind their information (which is full of mistruths) why don't they actually say who they are...oh I know - because if you are anonymous you can't be held liable for slander and lies. Had their information been presented in even a half-truth manner it would bring them some credibility, but since most of the information can easily be debunked...it just solidifies that Anonymous is just another fan trying to spread misinformation and ill will because "Big Bad NCSoft" closed down their game.
CoH DID NOT have a 95% retention rate let's be VERY clear about that - that information is easily accessed. CoH was running at approx 25% of it's peak subscriber base at the end.
Total operating cost of 4 million - you're kidding right? Competing against Google in Mountain View...and you think 50k a year is high for a developer??? Try LOW.
There is absolutely NO ONE on RECORD stating they offered 80 million to purchase CoH - What kind of fool would? EVEN IF all the other numbers were correct and EVERY player remained VIP that would take 10 YEARS JUST to recoup costs. All you have for this 80 million offer is yet ANOTHER anonymous source.
NCSoft valuation of CoH @ 3 million for tax purposes; funny since NCSoft has not even filed their tazes yet...how would this ANONYMOUS source know this?
The only thing this anonymous source got correct was this: NCSoft tried to work with Paragon, they really did. But the profits were not what they needed to be, and CoH/Paragon were the weak link in NCsoft's lineup moving forward.
I love how the anonymous source didn't try to claim no one at Paragon saw this coming; like they claimed in the beginning ... since both Matt Miller and Melissa Bianco have admitted they knew approximately 2 months before the announcement.
If this anonymous source stands behind their information (which is full of mistruths) why don't they actually say who they are...oh I know - because if you are anonymous you can't be held liable for slander and lies. Had their information been presented in even a half-truth manner it would bring them some credibility, but since most of the information can easily be debunked...it just solidifies that Anonymous is just another fan trying to spread misinformation and ill will because "Big Bad NCSoft" closed down their game.
CoH DID NOT have a 95% retention rate let's be VERY clear about that - that information is easily accessed. CoH was running at approx 25% of it's peak subscriber base at the end.
Total operating cost of 4 million - you're kidding right? Competing against Google in Mountain View...and you think 50k a year is high for a developer??? Try LOW.
There is absolutely NO ONE on RECORD stating they offered 80 million to purchase CoH - What kind of fool would? EVEN IF all the other numbers were correct and EVERY player remained VIP that would take 10 YEARS JUST to recoup costs. All you have for this 80 million offer is yet ANOTHER anonymous source.
NCSoft valuation of CoH @ 3 million for tax purposes; funny since NCSoft has not even filed their tazes yet...how would this ANONYMOUS source know this?
The only thing this anonymous source got correct was this: NCSoft tried to work with Paragon, they really did. But the profits were not what they needed to be, and CoH/Paragon were the weak link in NCsoft's lineup moving forward.
I love how the anonymous source didn't try to claim no one at Paragon saw this coming; like they claimed in the beginning ... since both Matt Miller and Melissa Bianco have admitted they knew approximately 2 months before the announcement.
If this anonymous source stands behind their information (which is full of mistruths) why don't they actually say who they are...oh I know - because if you are anonymous you can't be held liable for slander and lies. Had their information been presented in even a half-truth manner it would bring them some credibility, but since most of the information can easily be debunked...it just solidifies that Anonymous is just another fan trying to spread misinformation and ill will because "Big Bad NCSoft" closed down their game.
Did you read the article? was this after they filed there tazes? No one offered that amount,it was stated that was what they were looking for.
Comments
CoH costs exponentially more to run, always did. plus when both were in their earning primes there was a dimensional gap between what they pulled in in GW's favor.
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There was NEVER a server merger in CoH. You may be thinking about the consolidation of all servers into a single data-warehouse hosted in the US, before that EU players were forced to play on servers that had their own datacenter, without any ability to ever roll a character to play with US friends. The merger allowed people to play in any server from any region, that was all that ever "merged."
This alone is reason to debunk your grasp on the game, you don't even realize that servers never merged yet pretend to know the community's feel?
Why kill a title that linked (as in gave some bonuses in Guild wars 2 for completing stuff in Guild Wars 1) to the sequel that was recently released?
Does this mean that NCsoft/Arenanet *wont* shut down Guild Wars? Who knows, but I am not expecting to stay around forever. In fact, Arenanet quite possibly have more *power* with NCsoft than Paragon Studios ever did.
I personally give Guild Wars 1 another year or 2 before it gets shuttered, if it does get shuttered, or Arenanet depart from the NCsoft stable (and to be fair, it does look like they could fairly easily do that, seeing as Arenanet now manage the Guild Wars 2 accounts themselves (or at least that is the impression that the NCsoft Master account page gives... Guild Wars 2 doesn't appear on it).
I am going to be intrigued by the upcoming financials (should be released soonish from what I can remember)
yep. 20 million dollars invested in 2000.....team of ~30 employees as of ship...sales in excess of 7m and a cash shop. CoH probably had 6x the wages to be paid, cost of what was considered AAA back then, bad retention, much lower sales.
GW1 still has a dev team. Hosting costs are "nothing" for everyone involved Removing CoH servers didn't save any money. MMOs are expensive to maintain if you run only one, the more you run, the less impact each has, because the real overhead is on paying for the datacenter that you need whether you have one game or 20. In fact, closing CoH simply increases the effective hosting cost of all other games that remain live, GW1 included
Also, given the intense level of development sunk into GW2, ArenaNet was heavily on the red for a long time
Paragon Studios had a 80 man team, but about half that team was dedicated to that LostCraft MMO.
Ho boy, you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
First off, the servers were never merged - the server lists were merged. Originally, NA and EU servers operated on separate lists - the game was the same, but a player with an EU version of the game couldn't play on the US servers, and vice versa. Eventually they were desegregated - that was the "merge".
The main goal of the #savecoh movement is to get the game sold to a responsible owner. Selling to EA would be a Pet Cemetary scenario.
Are you familiar with the term "maintenance mode"? Very few businesses - and MMOs almost never - simply pull the plug at the first time of trouble. You get warning signs - updates slow down, servers merge, layoffs - CoH had none of that. One week, a brand new powerset and an expansion in open beta. The next day, everybody's fired.
Yep - not to mention they also said it when the game was slowly turning a profit, as it was the case with Tabula Rase which, while not the breakout hit they were hoping for, was still slowly paying itself off. If briefly.
Check NCsoft's own revenue reports. Either that's not true, or NCsoft paid the developers as though they were its own execs.
{hint: it's the first}
Except CoH wasn't recycled - everyone was fired and the IP sequestered. There was no attempt at all to reuse any element of the franchise, either from personnell or code.
GW2 has already made up the cost of its production.
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Servers
The European servers were merged with the American servers because of LOW POPULATION ISSUES. They had to open the game up so all players around the world could chose to play with those in other areas. Even their own WIKI shows 9 of the 15 servers with LOW populations even AFTER the world merging of servers.
And YES, it is a MERGER...even THEY called it one.
Right here on this very site as well as others there is an article that in Sept of 2008 City of Heroes had 125,000 subscribers, according to a press release by Paragon.
125,000 x 14.99 per month = $1,873,750 x 12 months = 22,485,000
As SAID BY THE PERSON TELLING US THEY RETAINED 95%+ of its subscribers yet at the same time told us it made $12,000,000.
12 million is NOT 95-98% of 22.4 million.
This person is a flat out LIAR, I dont CARE if the game was GOOD or not or deserved to be shut down or NOT...he is a liar.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
I never had to log into my NCsoft account page to buy the game. In fact, you *can* play Guild Wars 2 without having an NCsoft account.
Does this mean that if you never have to use the support page (which I haven't), then it will never be linked up to an NCsoft master account?
Ummmmm.....no it was not a merger. In fact they created a new VIP server, and just added the European servers to the main list. No server was merged with another.
So, to get this straight, you're saying that CoX never made back its initial production costs? Count me curious here.
You do realize {wishful thinking, I know} that every time the idea of merging the servers was brought up in the forums, it was collectively shouted down by nearly everyone else, to the point that rather than go through it again, it was usually met with a boilerplate response of "no, and here are the reasons why". The server lists were merged for player convenience, and to streamline the game clients with the new NCsoft launcher application. And finally, the low-population servers were that way intentionally - a lot of players liked the "small town" feel of the smaller servers, while the rest congregated on Virtue, Freedom and Union.
Server LIST merger. Not Server Merger. Don't play dumb, you know "server merger due to low population" means to merge populations of two individual servers, and that was never done.
And "Low" was not empty, I played in one of the "emptiest" servers and it was very active. All servers went through a lot of upgrades over the years, with Freedom getting the biggest upgrade. Servers basically reported LOW at the stress level where they reported MEDIUM at launch.
Small correction, contention, whatever you'd care to call it - I doubt any individual server got an upgrade. Nowadays virtualization is the name of the game - a game server isn't a physical box anymore, but a virtual machine in a much larger server pool, with resources allocated to it on the fly, so the upgrade of the game servers increased the amount of resources each game shard had.
if you go to their gw2 customer support page you have to log in with your ncsoft master account, or create one if you don't have it. furthermore, once you've linked a GW account to the GW2 account, if you change your GW2 log in info, your GW1 account changes to that info.
yea if you never use their CS you won't be bothered to make/link account for ncsoft...but if you do you will.
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CoH DID NOT have a 95% retention rate let's be VERY clear about that - that information is easily accessed. CoH was running at approx 25% of it's peak subscriber base at the end.
Total operating cost of 4 million - you're kidding right? Competing against Google in Mountain View...and you think 50k a year is high for a developer??? Try LOW.
There is absolutely NO ONE on RECORD stating they offered 80 million to purchase CoH - What kind of fool would? EVEN IF all the other numbers were correct and EVERY player remained VIP that would take 10 YEARS JUST to recoup costs. All you have for this 80 million offer is yet ANOTHER anonymous source.
NCSoft valuation of CoH @ 3 million for tax purposes; funny since NCSoft has not even filed their tazes yet...how would this ANONYMOUS source know this?
The only thing this anonymous source got correct was this: NCSoft tried to work with Paragon, they really did. But the profits were not what they needed to be, and CoH/Paragon were the weak link in NCsoft's lineup moving forward.
I love how the anonymous source didn't try to claim no one at Paragon saw this coming; like they claimed in the beginning ... since both Matt Miller and Melissa Bianco have admitted they knew approximately 2 months before the announcement.
If this anonymous source stands behind their information (which is full of mistruths) why don't they actually say who they are...oh I know - because if you are anonymous you can't be held liable for slander and lies. Had their information been presented in even a half-truth manner it would bring them some credibility, but since most of the information can easily be debunked...it just solidifies that Anonymous is just another fan trying to spread misinformation and ill will because "Big Bad NCSoft" closed down their game.
this.
Did you read the article? was this after they filed there tazes? No one offered that amount,it was stated that was what they were looking for.