Eh, he's right. None of them are going anywhere. Even a quick glance at the City of Titans website, which has less features than a default template from Dreamweaver 15 years ago, shows they've made absolutely no progress. When their latest two videos are entirely (at best) tech demos for UE4, and they by their own admission have zero features or assets that they made on their own, that's saying a lot.
I did enough engine work with UE1 and UE2 to know how absurdly easy it is to bring in your own assets, of virtually any type (models, animations, textures, blah blah) to know that if you're still showing stock features given to you by Epic you haven't done anything.
It's not that I wish ill on any of these projects, but I do feel bad for people who are getting any amount of their hopes up.
The successor projects shot themselves in the foot from the first step by trying to actually remake City of Heroes (or improve upon it)
MMORPGs are where money goes to die. There's a reason why people are like "This is going to go Free-to-play in a year" and why these games keep folding within a couple years of launch, or die before they even really get off the ground after years of stymied development. Or they basically decimate the studio that originally developed it or the publisher that originally put it out, and end up changing hands to a completely different company just in order to stay alive.
They're a terrible way to make money. Putting all other feelings I have about the genre aside on a creative or gameplay level, they're financially insane. The days when WoW was king shit of the yard have been over for a while (MOBAs have been eating their lunch for a good bit now). They're a terrible genre for any company to develop for, from a financial standpoint. It's why ESO is launching with three completely separate vectors for income (full price purchase, plus subscription, plus cash shop) right from the get-go because the writing on the wall is telling them they're going to need it to not fucking die.
Now, you might say "But wait, these strappy indies aren't in it for the money, they're in it because they loved City of Heroes and they want to see more superhero MMORPGs!"
Yeah, well, it still costs money to develop a game, and MMORPGs are by far the most costly game genre of all to develop. They're the most resource intensive, the most elaborate to program, the most difficult to test and debug. And more than any other game genre, they have the most ongoing costs, with not just patches and new content but just the costs of keeping servers afloat and having staff to maintain shit and administrate the live online space.
Triple A studios can't make this shit work anymore. They try and they fail. EA is one of the largest video game companies on the planet and SWTOR still had to resort to a free-to-play cash shop model within a year just to justify the millions of dollars they sank into making it. ESO probably has a lifespan of 2 years, tops, before ZeniMax pulls the plug on that giant money-vortex.
There are indie MMORPGs that trundle along, and they survive. There's smaller-scale games that make it work. These forum itself is full of threads for niche games that survive in a crowded marketplace. But all of those games either had to drastically compromise on their initial intentions and design goals and take heavy losses, or they had to start with very small, reasonable understandings of what can be done for that kind of money and development team size.
What they should have done in the first place was not made a MMORPG. If they wanted to capture the feeling, the experience of City of Heroes, of making your own superhero and teaming up with your buddies and going on missions and all that, they could've done that with a much more conventional action RPG that had online multiplayer, on smaller scale servers that didn't require unified singular MMORPG "worlds".
Think of the successes of smaller scale multiplayer online games, like Minecraft, Rust, DayZ, or Starbound. Those aren't "MMORPGs" in any conventional sense of the term. They're online multiplayer games, but they lack the "massiveness" and I think that lack of a massiveness is a boon, not a bad thing. By dropping the reach for the "massive" you can make a better, tighter focused, more well-designed game that functions on an indie developer budget and resource capability.
But they couldn't do that. They had to go big or go home. They had to replicate City of Heroes as closely as copyright would allow them, while maybe improving a feature here or there and doing things differently that they wish CoH would've done. They couldn't just let it fucking go and try to take the parts of City of Heroes they remember fondly and carry that forward into a new game, something that you can play online with your friends and will be fun and can do fun things with. No, instead they have to take a bunch of people's money from Kickstarter and throw it in a fire.
I don't hate them. It doesn't make me angry. It makes me sad. I feel sorry for them. It's like a buddy who has had a really bad break-up, his girlfriend dumped him and moved to Korea and he can't fucking deal, and you go over to his house and not only does he still have all her old stuff she left behind but like
when you talk to him about dating again, about maybe looking for a new girlfriend, he tells you about how he is looking for a new girlfriend... the snag is that she has to look exactly like the old girlfriend because that way she will be able to fit into all her old clothes he still has, and she has to be cool with responding to the old girlfriend's name. IT WILL BE JUST LIKE SHE NEVER LEFT, they sob.
I just want to grab them by the shoulders, turn off the Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" that's been playing on loop since 2012, and tell them to get help, and try to move on.
I'm sorry if that strikes you as cynical. I really am. But I also don't want to see anyone give their money to a bunch of sad-but-well-meaning fools, and I don't have any room in my heart to believe that they'll even have a hope of success with the goals they've set out for themselves.
+11
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
It's why ESO is launching with three completely separate vectors for income (full price purchase, plus subscription, plus cash shop) right from the get-go because the writing on the wall is telling them they're going to need it to not fucking die.
The rest of your statement aside, this is factually wrong. There is no cash shop for ESO, and no intention to have one, which has been clearly repeated multiple times by the creators.
Sure, it may get one some day like so many subscription MMOs before it, but right now it is operating entirely on the box price + sub model, with a collector's edition for some in-game bonuses.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I really disagree with the sentiment that MMOs are where "money goes to die." MMOs take more investment to setup, but with the right support and time given to them for operation length, they can be an income generator.
If they had made something other than a superhero MMO, no one would've given them a dollar.
I'm going to disagree with you on that. As is, I didn't give any money to the Kickstarter because I have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that a team of amateurs will be able to rebuild CoX. If they had instead made a goal of building a superhero themed action RPG with a lot of customization options and co-op multiplayer, then maybe I would have given them the benefit of the doubt and tossed them a few bucks.
Like, Wildstar would probably be pretty successful if it launched on Guild Wars' model of buy pretty princess dressup shit, but it probably will do really badly at $60 and $15 a month. For example, Guild wars 2 is making a decent profit.
But like, this isn't limited to MMOs! Just as many shooters fail because they try to be Call of Duty and you can't out CoD CoD.
That aside, the reason most MMOs fail is that they are just plain not good, even Secret World which I love to death is just abysmal in terms of gameplay (although I believe that unless you already have your base hooked like WoW, a $15 monthly fee is asinine in 2014)
Wildstar already has the mechanics for a pretty clean slide into a GW2 model. Dyes, costumes, mounts, mount flair, and not to mention the vast amount of housing stuff are all perfectly suited to a cash shop.
what the people working on / backing these projects want isn't 'Marvel Heroes with a character creator,' though. They just want City of Heroes.
Lots of MMOs are profitable, but there's a difference between turning a profit and being a good business proposition. SWTOR is (iirc) making money, but I doubt EA looks at it and says 'yeah that turned out to be a good use of resources.' Hell CoX supposedly was marginally profitable at the time it shut down.
I think we'll see fewer and fewer MMOs fail (in the sense of shutting down) once they're running, just because microtransaction marketing allows a relatively small enthusiast playerbase to sustain a game. But creating an MMO from scratch remains a pretty daunting proposition, much more so that making a different/simpler type of game.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
IIRC, CoX was profitable at the time it shut down. I think it was actually probably making more money than it had since its release. There were certainly tons more people playing than there were in the pre free-to-play years, and costume bundles were great (and most of the people I knew were buying them). End-game content (Incarnate stuff) was pretty basic and easy, and even though it was behind the subscription access and wasn't necessary, I was always getting full raids. Virtue and Freedom typically had high populations in the evening, especially Friday-Sunday.
IIRC, CoX was profitable at the time it shut down. I think it was actually probably making more money than it had since its release. There were certainly tons more people playing than there were in the pre free-to-play years, and costume bundles were great (and most of the people I knew were buying them). End-game content (Incarnate stuff) was pretty basic and easy, and even though it was behind the subscription access and wasn't necessary, I was always getting full raids. Virtue and Freedom typically had high populations in the evening, especially Friday-Sunday.
Super good. I wish I could play it now.
The funny thing is, as far as selling cosmetics in video games goes, City of Heroes was the perfect platform for that sales model. What constitutes dressing as super heroes do varies in comic books. You can make anything and put a price on it. And people will want it. With any other MMO, you generally have to limit yourself to what the setting is.
If anything is hurting MMOs at the moment, it's that F2P is the new business angle to abuse. And because of the abuse, it's making people wary of even the legit (I should say more fair) setups.
So making a game an MMO doesn't mean it's dead on arrival or won't make money. What matters is making a good sell to players. "Our thing is worth paying for and here's why." If you take the TOR route where you say, "You have to pay for every damn thing," it'll ruin things.
yeah the game devs seemed to have no clue why it was shut down, they had a major content patch about to launch
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
CoX also didn't launch well in Korea because ... well, obvious reasons, some of which were mirrored in Aion's flop Stateside. If you asked me what group of people would most appreciate a superhero game heavily themed around American comic books, "Koreans" would not be at the top of my list.
What was it that caused the deal to sell CoX to fail? I remember there being mention that talks fell through at the 11th hour.
CoX also didn't launch well in Korea because ... well, obvious reasons, some of which were mirrored in Aion's flop Stateside. If you asked me what group of people would most appreciate a superhero game heavily themed around American comic books, "Koreans" would not be at the top of my list.
What was it that caused the deal to sell CoX to fail? I remember there being mention that talks fell through at the 11th hour.
You mean NCSoft demanding like 80 million dollars for the IP rights? Which is an absurd price to put on something if you shuttered it for not being worth the money, even though it was bringing in money, and oh god just fuck NCSoft into the earth.
I can't help but wonder whether through whatever power the investors have, I can only assume they've got a decent amount of it, that the people responsible for basically chucking one of NCSoft's biggest moneymakers into the hamburger grinder were canned and replaced with people with an ounce of grey matter between their ears.
Or I can only hope, because god if something wasn't done to prevent such a ridiculously out-of-left-field and anti-profit move I just kind of feel wary about what might happen to some of their newer products.
If I had to guess, while CoX was profitable, NCSoft did number crunching and was worried that the profits would decrease in the future to the point where it was best to just cut their losses now while the game wasn't a drain on the company. Someone said this earlier in the thread, and that it's you don't wait for something to actively cause losses before you kill it: you try to predict when the profits will get too low and cut the project loose at that point.
Of course, it's reasonable to say that NCSoft was being paranoid or had done some really fucked up math when it came to CoX's earnings.
I'm obviously biased, but I think that, while that's a somewhat reasonable way of conducting business, MMOs aren't just services - they're communities. I feel like there are implicit responsibilities one takes on when they create or adopt one. "Hey, this is doing well now, but it might not in the future" is some super asshole reasoning to kill off a community that had literally been around longer than World of Warcraft's. If you think a game might have problems in the future, you try and fix it. If it can't perform to the level you want, you sell it. If you can't sell it for 'fuck you' prices, settle for reasonable ones, because tens of thousands of players of your players should mean something to you - assuming you give a fuck about them.
CoX's main fault is that their team was supposed to be working on a new MMO and had tried and failed, like, three times. How you fail at a game that's still on the drawing board, I'm not sure.
But that doesn't really justify their refusal to sell it off or the way in which they closed it.
CoX's main fault is that their team was supposed to be working on a new MMO and had tried and failed, like, three times. How you fail at a game that's still on the drawing board, I'm not sure.
But that doesn't really justify their refusal to sell it off or the way in which they closed it.
Yeah, I'd say asking 80 million for a property like SWTOR or even ESO might be pushing it. Let alone a little company that made a cool game about Superheroes.
yeah the game devs seemed to have no clue why it was shut down, they had a major content patch about to launch
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
This just isn't true. The people at Paragon Studios were negotiating to stay open right up until the announcement, this was a Thing behind the scenes for a while. And while CoH was very profitable, Paragon Studios was not - their contract wasn't just to operate CoH, but to design and build a next-gen MMO too, and they repeatedly tried and failed to do that. Shutting them down for being unable to fulfill their contract meant shutting down the game too.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
yeah the game devs seemed to have no clue why it was shut down, they had a major content patch about to launch
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
This just isn't true. The people at Paragon Studios were negotiating to stay open right up until the announcement, this was a Thing behind the scenes for a while. And while CoH was very profitable, Paragon Studios was not - their contract wasn't just to operate CoH, but to design and build a next-gen MMO too, and they repeatedly tried and failed to do that. Shutting them down for being unable to fulfill their contract meant shutting down the game too.
So then why was NCSoft's official reasoning that CoH didn't fit NCSoft's "image" and not that? Because that may have been an actual, y'know, understandable reason. But they've never said it, not at least at the time that the shit went down. If it's been said long after the fact it sounds like a doge for stigma.
Frankly, trying to get Paragon Studios to make another game alongside CoH development was a stupid demand. A company like Blizzard can get away with it because $$$. Paragon was NOT that size though, not by a longshot.
Edit - I would attribute it to sabotage basically.
I can't think of any companies which have actually made another MMO while maintaining their current one which wasn't backed by a very large publisher anyway. And in the grand scheme of things, NCSoft doesn't quite compare to EA, Blizzard and SOE.
yeah the game devs seemed to have no clue why it was shut down, they had a major content patch about to launch
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
This just isn't true. The people at Paragon Studios were negotiating to stay open right up until the announcement, this was a Thing behind the scenes for a while. And while CoH was very profitable, Paragon Studios was not - their contract wasn't just to operate CoH, but to design and build a next-gen MMO too, and they repeatedly tried and failed to do that. Shutting them down for being unable to fulfill their contract meant shutting down the game too.
So then why was NCSoft's official reasoning that CoH didn't fit NCSoft's "image" and not that? Because that may have been an actual, y'know, understandable reason. But they've never said it, not at least at the time that the shit went down. If it's been said long after the fact it sounds like a doge for stigma.
Frankly, trying to get Paragon Studios to make another game alongside CoH development was a stupid demand. A company like Blizzard can get away with it because $$$. Paragon was NOT that size though, not by a longshot.
Edit - I would attribute it to sabotage basically.
I'd love some sources on these things you're saying. I'm not happy with NCSoft, but there's an uncomfortable 'the Koreans closed it down coz they hate our freedoms' tinge to your posts.
The above are why I've always found the second MMO claim suspect. NCsoft was getting shit dumped on by almost the entire gaming media when they made the announcement to close CoX, and what response they offered to the reaction was vague. You got more information out of the Paragon guys than NCsoft, really.
Point being, if the problem had been Paragon Studios failing to uphold a contract, NCsoft would have said so back then. It would have deflected a lot of heat. The only reason not to would be that they intended to sell Paragon Studios (hard to do that if you admit publicly that they suck at fulfilling contracts), but that doesn't seem the case because of the apparently ridiculous asking price.
It kinda says something about the state of games journalism that I can't find any definitive answers to this stuff on the net. I can't find much officially written by NCSoft, but I can't find any 'investigative journalism' at all.
It kinda says something about the state of games journalism that I can't find any definitive answers to this stuff on the net. I can't find much officially written by NCSoft, but I can't find any 'investigative journalism' at all.
Maybe the latter is just dead?
The latter has never really existed in the realm of gaming media. While 'real' news is still trying to come to grips with what to do with click-bait pseudo journalist bloggers ("what to do" universally seems to be "lets completely give up our integrity to try to compete" :rotate: ), that's been the state of video games 'journalism' since day one. Granted it's gotten worse over time with advertising more and more blatantly interfering with content (Gerstmann-gate should have resulted in some introspection for the industry and an about face on policy; in fact the opposite occurred), but I can't think of a time where there was anyone interested in doing journalism as much as they were carriers of screenshots and press releases.
I have no doubt there's NDA's relating to the closure of Paragon, but you're right, some level of digging should be able to produce more answers than we ever got. I would be astounded if there weren't more than a few Paragon (or even NCSoft) employees who would have been happy to speak to someone if given the chance, on the condition of anonymity.
I also have no doubt that among the day to day workers at both places, there likely wasn't a lot of transparency as to what was going on and why Paragon got shuttered. But there are obviously people who do know the deal; but your joystiqs and kotakus and such were more interested in posting "ZOMG THIS THING IS HAPPENING" 'articles', instead of actually digging and finding out what happened. "THIS IS THE END" is a more click-worthy headline than "This is the business related details of the closure of Paragon Studios".
yeah the game devs seemed to have no clue why it was shut down, they had a major content patch about to launch
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
This just isn't true. The people at Paragon Studios were negotiating to stay open right up until the announcement, this was a Thing behind the scenes for a while. And while CoH was very profitable, Paragon Studios was not - their contract wasn't just to operate CoH, but to design and build a next-gen MMO too, and they repeatedly tried and failed to do that. Shutting them down for being unable to fulfill their contract meant shutting down the game too.
So then why was NCSoft's official reasoning that CoH didn't fit NCSoft's "image" and not that? Because that may have been an actual, y'know, understandable reason. But they've never said it, not at least at the time that the shit went down. If it's been said long after the fact it sounds like a doge for stigma.
Frankly, trying to get Paragon Studios to make another game alongside CoH development was a stupid demand. A company like Blizzard can get away with it because $$$. Paragon was NOT that size though, not by a longshot.
Edit - I would attribute it to sabotage basically.
I'd love some sources on these things you're saying. I'm not happy with NCSoft, but there's an uncomfortable 'the Koreans closed it down coz they hate our freedoms' tinge to your posts.
That's a hell of a straw man.
NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers and consumers alike. You don't recall the Richard Garriott stuff that went down regarding Tabula Rasa? That they provided fraudulent documents in court? Or when they shuttered Auto Assault under questionable circumstances? I mean Auto Assault is a great example of their arbitrary decision making - even if it wasn't going anywhere, money-wise, what's the difference between it and Aion? Aion is also a game losing money (or was, is it even open still?). But it was allowed to remain open. Why? It was popular among their native market, whereas AA and CoX weren't.
So please. This isn't a "THEY HATE AMERICA" thing, this is about how companies do their business in their native and foreign markets. NCSoft is weird in that they decide things should live and die based on their popularity in their native market, rather than those products' actual success. Look at Metroid - that series was never popular in Japan, not on the order that it got popular in America. Did Nintendo, a Japanese company, shutter Metroid as a series? Hell no, they realized one market was super into it and continued to provide.
+1
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
It kinda says something about the state of games journalism that I can't find any definitive answers to this stuff on the net. I can't find much officially written by NCSoft, but I can't find any 'investigative journalism' at all.
Maybe the latter is just dead?
The latter has never really existed in the realm of gaming media. While 'real' news is still trying to come to grips with what to do with click-bait pseudo journalist bloggers ("what to do" universally seems to be "lets completely give up our integrity to try to compete" :rotate: ), that's been the state of video games 'journalism' since day one. Granted it's gotten worse over time with advertising more and more blatantly interfering with content (Gerstmann-gate should have resulted in some introspection for the industry and an about face on policy; in fact the opposite occurred), but I can't think of a time where there was anyone interested in doing journalism as much as they were carriers of screenshots and press releases.
I have no doubt there's NDA's relating to the closure of Paragon, but you're right, some level of digging should be able to produce more answers than we ever got. I would be astounded if there weren't more than a few Paragon (or even NCSoft) employees who would have been happy to speak to someone if given the chance, on the condition of anonymity.
I also have no doubt that among the day to day workers at both places, there likely wasn't a lot of transparency as to what was going on and why Paragon got shuttered. But there are obviously people who do know the deal; but your joystiqs and kotakus and such were more interested in posting "ZOMG THIS THING IS HAPPENING" 'articles', instead of actually digging and finding out what happened. "THIS IS THE END" is a more click-worthy headline than "This is the business related details of the closure of Paragon Studios".
How awesome would it be if one of the big guys did a prestige site that focused on the business, that operated at a slower pace, and didn't need the clicks?
Like, Joystiq or somesuch company dedicating a quarterly release of articles that aren't breaking news, but rather interesting postmortems and stories from industry insiders and deeper explanations on the machinery of the industry, and not just OMG HALO 5 COMING OUT! Stuff. Stories that have had time to cool, the dust settled, and get some solid perspective on what happened, why it happened, history and context.
Kind of like how Hollywood studios makes its superhero blockbusters, but also does artistic stuff under independent / different labels that does not have to generate the revenue, because it is supported by the stuff aimed at the masses.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
unless an actual stakeholder who was in whatever board meeting decided CoX's fate decides to come forward and talk about it (or leaks something), there's really no way to know for sure what happened; even the people are paragon studios might not really know for sure.
it's easy to say that 'digging' should take place, but it's not like we can file a FOIA request and get the meeting minutes or something
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
To be honest I don't wanna know why anymore. It's all but moot at this point, and if NCSoft gave two shits about their image in the US, they'd have said something by now.
All this has done is make me look at Wildstar with even more sadness. I want to play that, I REALLY do... but I don't want to give NCSoft anymore of my money. And it sucks, because I'd rather give the developers money, because I want them to actually succeed... I just wish they weren't under the umbrella of a company I objectively hate.
Sorta like how Bioware is at the moment... unfortunate.
If Wildstar was not teamed up with NCSoft, I would totally give it a try. However, that is not the case, and NCSoft can rot in a ditch for all the heartache they caused by killing CoX.
I loved the game, especially from the villain side. My stalker was a certified badass and so much fun to play. I loved the villain storylines and the atmosphere of the evil side, even if I kind of played my villain as more of an anti-hero. For the main hero and villain characters not having existed prior to the game launching, I got super invested in their storylines. Like the story of Ghost Widow was really well done!
The jackass company responsible for killing that game gets nothing from me ever again.
Personally, while I'm not happy with NCSoft I've not let that keep me from enjoying other products they publish. I'm glad I chose to play GW2, and WildStar is also a very fun game with devs that deserve a ton of support. Jackass move, yeah... But the options are kind of limited.
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Still growing?
I haven't checked on those two projects that popped up in a while since they were still in concept/design phase.
Boo to your pessimism.
Origin: RollThatKatamari
I did enough engine work with UE1 and UE2 to know how absurdly easy it is to bring in your own assets, of virtually any type (models, animations, textures, blah blah) to know that if you're still showing stock features given to you by Epic you haven't done anything.
It's not that I wish ill on any of these projects, but I do feel bad for people who are getting any amount of their hopes up.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
MMORPGs are where money goes to die. There's a reason why people are like "This is going to go Free-to-play in a year" and why these games keep folding within a couple years of launch, or die before they even really get off the ground after years of stymied development. Or they basically decimate the studio that originally developed it or the publisher that originally put it out, and end up changing hands to a completely different company just in order to stay alive.
They're a terrible way to make money. Putting all other feelings I have about the genre aside on a creative or gameplay level, they're financially insane. The days when WoW was king shit of the yard have been over for a while (MOBAs have been eating their lunch for a good bit now). They're a terrible genre for any company to develop for, from a financial standpoint. It's why ESO is launching with three completely separate vectors for income (full price purchase, plus subscription, plus cash shop) right from the get-go because the writing on the wall is telling them they're going to need it to not fucking die.
Now, you might say "But wait, these strappy indies aren't in it for the money, they're in it because they loved City of Heroes and they want to see more superhero MMORPGs!"
Yeah, well, it still costs money to develop a game, and MMORPGs are by far the most costly game genre of all to develop. They're the most resource intensive, the most elaborate to program, the most difficult to test and debug. And more than any other game genre, they have the most ongoing costs, with not just patches and new content but just the costs of keeping servers afloat and having staff to maintain shit and administrate the live online space.
Triple A studios can't make this shit work anymore. They try and they fail. EA is one of the largest video game companies on the planet and SWTOR still had to resort to a free-to-play cash shop model within a year just to justify the millions of dollars they sank into making it. ESO probably has a lifespan of 2 years, tops, before ZeniMax pulls the plug on that giant money-vortex.
There are indie MMORPGs that trundle along, and they survive. There's smaller-scale games that make it work. These forum itself is full of threads for niche games that survive in a crowded marketplace. But all of those games either had to drastically compromise on their initial intentions and design goals and take heavy losses, or they had to start with very small, reasonable understandings of what can be done for that kind of money and development team size.
What they should have done in the first place was not made a MMORPG. If they wanted to capture the feeling, the experience of City of Heroes, of making your own superhero and teaming up with your buddies and going on missions and all that, they could've done that with a much more conventional action RPG that had online multiplayer, on smaller scale servers that didn't require unified singular MMORPG "worlds".
Think of the successes of smaller scale multiplayer online games, like Minecraft, Rust, DayZ, or Starbound. Those aren't "MMORPGs" in any conventional sense of the term. They're online multiplayer games, but they lack the "massiveness" and I think that lack of a massiveness is a boon, not a bad thing. By dropping the reach for the "massive" you can make a better, tighter focused, more well-designed game that functions on an indie developer budget and resource capability.
But they couldn't do that. They had to go big or go home. They had to replicate City of Heroes as closely as copyright would allow them, while maybe improving a feature here or there and doing things differently that they wish CoH would've done. They couldn't just let it fucking go and try to take the parts of City of Heroes they remember fondly and carry that forward into a new game, something that you can play online with your friends and will be fun and can do fun things with. No, instead they have to take a bunch of people's money from Kickstarter and throw it in a fire.
I don't hate them. It doesn't make me angry. It makes me sad. I feel sorry for them. It's like a buddy who has had a really bad break-up, his girlfriend dumped him and moved to Korea and he can't fucking deal, and you go over to his house and not only does he still have all her old stuff she left behind but like
when you talk to him about dating again, about maybe looking for a new girlfriend, he tells you about how he is looking for a new girlfriend... the snag is that she has to look exactly like the old girlfriend because that way she will be able to fit into all her old clothes he still has, and she has to be cool with responding to the old girlfriend's name. IT WILL BE JUST LIKE SHE NEVER LEFT, they sob.
I just want to grab them by the shoulders, turn off the Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" that's been playing on loop since 2012, and tell them to get help, and try to move on.
I'm sorry if that strikes you as cynical. I really am. But I also don't want to see anyone give their money to a bunch of sad-but-well-meaning fools, and I don't have any room in my heart to believe that they'll even have a hope of success with the goals they've set out for themselves.
The rest of your statement aside, this is factually wrong. There is no cash shop for ESO, and no intention to have one, which has been clearly repeated multiple times by the creators.
Sure, it may get one some day like so many subscription MMOs before it, but right now it is operating entirely on the box price + sub model, with a collector's edition for some in-game bonuses.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
There are still regular expansions and upgrades for LOTRO.
MMOs can make money, through either FTP or subscription models.
which is fucking sad
I'm going to disagree with you on that. As is, I didn't give any money to the Kickstarter because I have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that a team of amateurs will be able to rebuild CoX. If they had instead made a goal of building a superhero themed action RPG with a lot of customization options and co-op multiplayer, then maybe I would have given them the benefit of the doubt and tossed them a few bucks.
MMOs that they sink a hundred million into aren't
Like, Wildstar would probably be pretty successful if it launched on Guild Wars' model of buy pretty princess dressup shit, but it probably will do really badly at $60 and $15 a month. For example, Guild wars 2 is making a decent profit.
But like, this isn't limited to MMOs! Just as many shooters fail because they try to be Call of Duty and you can't out CoD CoD.
That aside, the reason most MMOs fail is that they are just plain not good, even Secret World which I love to death is just abysmal in terms of gameplay (although I believe that unless you already have your base hooked like WoW, a $15 monthly fee is asinine in 2014)
Lots of MMOs are profitable, but there's a difference between turning a profit and being a good business proposition. SWTOR is (iirc) making money, but I doubt EA looks at it and says 'yeah that turned out to be a good use of resources.' Hell CoX supposedly was marginally profitable at the time it shut down.
I think we'll see fewer and fewer MMOs fail (in the sense of shutting down) once they're running, just because microtransaction marketing allows a relatively small enthusiast playerbase to sustain a game. But creating an MMO from scratch remains a pretty daunting proposition, much more so that making a different/simpler type of game.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Super good. I wish I could play it now.
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The funny thing is, as far as selling cosmetics in video games goes, City of Heroes was the perfect platform for that sales model. What constitutes dressing as super heroes do varies in comic books. You can make anything and put a price on it. And people will want it. With any other MMO, you generally have to limit yourself to what the setting is.
If anything is hurting MMOs at the moment, it's that F2P is the new business angle to abuse. And because of the abuse, it's making people wary of even the legit (I should say more fair) setups.
So making a game an MMO doesn't mean it's dead on arrival or won't make money. What matters is making a good sell to players. "Our thing is worth paying for and here's why." If you take the TOR route where you say, "You have to pay for every damn thing," it'll ruin things.
I dont think profitability is why it was killed
It was pride, frankly. NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers they buy (probably because those devs don't bow down to every order or instruction without a fight, or just expect creative freedom).
It's been said before of CoX closing; the company shuttered a game that was bringing in money, and yet Aion, a money hole, was left operational. The former was not popular in Korea, the latter was so it got to stay. Even investors in Korea were like "what the fuck" at the whole decision. It was arbitrary as fuck.
What was it that caused the deal to sell CoX to fail? I remember there being mention that talks fell through at the 11th hour.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
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You mean NCSoft demanding like 80 million dollars for the IP rights? Which is an absurd price to put on something if you shuttered it for not being worth the money, even though it was bringing in money, and oh god just fuck NCSoft into the earth.
Or I can only hope, because god if something wasn't done to prevent such a ridiculously out-of-left-field and anti-profit move I just kind of feel wary about what might happen to some of their newer products.
Of course, it's reasonable to say that NCSoft was being paranoid or had done some really fucked up math when it came to CoX's earnings.
The problem is that NCsoft didn't.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
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But that doesn't really justify their refusal to sell it off or the way in which they closed it.
Yeah, I'd say asking 80 million for a property like SWTOR or even ESO might be pushing it. Let alone a little company that made a cool game about Superheroes.
This just isn't true. The people at Paragon Studios were negotiating to stay open right up until the announcement, this was a Thing behind the scenes for a while. And while CoH was very profitable, Paragon Studios was not - their contract wasn't just to operate CoH, but to design and build a next-gen MMO too, and they repeatedly tried and failed to do that. Shutting them down for being unable to fulfill their contract meant shutting down the game too.
So then why was NCSoft's official reasoning that CoH didn't fit NCSoft's "image" and not that? Because that may have been an actual, y'know, understandable reason. But they've never said it, not at least at the time that the shit went down. If it's been said long after the fact it sounds like a doge for stigma.
Frankly, trying to get Paragon Studios to make another game alongside CoH development was a stupid demand. A company like Blizzard can get away with it because $$$. Paragon was NOT that size though, not by a longshot.
Edit - I would attribute it to sabotage basically.
I'd love some sources on these things you're saying. I'm not happy with NCSoft, but there's an uncomfortable 'the Koreans closed it down coz they hate our freedoms' tinge to your posts.
Point being, if the problem had been Paragon Studios failing to uphold a contract, NCsoft would have said so back then. It would have deflected a lot of heat. The only reason not to would be that they intended to sell Paragon Studios (hard to do that if you admit publicly that they suck at fulfilling contracts), but that doesn't seem the case because of the apparently ridiculous asking price.
So, like. Malice or stupidity. Take your pick.
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Maybe the latter is just dead?
The latter has never really existed in the realm of gaming media. While 'real' news is still trying to come to grips with what to do with click-bait pseudo journalist bloggers ("what to do" universally seems to be "lets completely give up our integrity to try to compete" :rotate: ), that's been the state of video games 'journalism' since day one. Granted it's gotten worse over time with advertising more and more blatantly interfering with content (Gerstmann-gate should have resulted in some introspection for the industry and an about face on policy; in fact the opposite occurred), but I can't think of a time where there was anyone interested in doing journalism as much as they were carriers of screenshots and press releases.
I have no doubt there's NDA's relating to the closure of Paragon, but you're right, some level of digging should be able to produce more answers than we ever got. I would be astounded if there weren't more than a few Paragon (or even NCSoft) employees who would have been happy to speak to someone if given the chance, on the condition of anonymity.
I also have no doubt that among the day to day workers at both places, there likely wasn't a lot of transparency as to what was going on and why Paragon got shuttered. But there are obviously people who do know the deal; but your joystiqs and kotakus and such were more interested in posting "ZOMG THIS THING IS HAPPENING" 'articles', instead of actually digging and finding out what happened. "THIS IS THE END" is a more click-worthy headline than "This is the business related details of the closure of Paragon Studios".
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That's a hell of a straw man.
NCSoft has been aggressive toward western developers and consumers alike. You don't recall the Richard Garriott stuff that went down regarding Tabula Rasa? That they provided fraudulent documents in court? Or when they shuttered Auto Assault under questionable circumstances? I mean Auto Assault is a great example of their arbitrary decision making - even if it wasn't going anywhere, money-wise, what's the difference between it and Aion? Aion is also a game losing money (or was, is it even open still?). But it was allowed to remain open. Why? It was popular among their native market, whereas AA and CoX weren't.
So please. This isn't a "THEY HATE AMERICA" thing, this is about how companies do their business in their native and foreign markets. NCSoft is weird in that they decide things should live and die based on their popularity in their native market, rather than those products' actual success. Look at Metroid - that series was never popular in Japan, not on the order that it got popular in America. Did Nintendo, a Japanese company, shutter Metroid as a series? Hell no, they realized one market was super into it and continued to provide.
How awesome would it be if one of the big guys did a prestige site that focused on the business, that operated at a slower pace, and didn't need the clicks?
Like, Joystiq or somesuch company dedicating a quarterly release of articles that aren't breaking news, but rather interesting postmortems and stories from industry insiders and deeper explanations on the machinery of the industry, and not just OMG HALO 5 COMING OUT! Stuff. Stories that have had time to cool, the dust settled, and get some solid perspective on what happened, why it happened, history and context.
Kind of like how Hollywood studios makes its superhero blockbusters, but also does artistic stuff under independent / different labels that does not have to generate the revenue, because it is supported by the stuff aimed at the masses.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
it's easy to say that 'digging' should take place, but it's not like we can file a FOIA request and get the meeting minutes or something
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
All this has done is make me look at Wildstar with even more sadness. I want to play that, I REALLY do... but I don't want to give NCSoft anymore of my money. And it sucks, because I'd rather give the developers money, because I want them to actually succeed... I just wish they weren't under the umbrella of a company I objectively hate.
Sorta like how Bioware is at the moment... unfortunate.
I loved the game, especially from the villain side. My stalker was a certified badass and so much fun to play. I loved the villain storylines and the atmosphere of the evil side, even if I kind of played my villain as more of an anti-hero. For the main hero and villain characters not having existed prior to the game launching, I got super invested in their storylines. Like the story of Ghost Widow was really well done!
The jackass company responsible for killing that game gets nothing from me ever again.