Does Zenimax have any other MMO's besides Elder Scrolls Online?
Nope, but ESO is doing surprisingly well, a new expansion comes out this summer.
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
Right, but the point was made that pretty much every MMO publisher with multiple titles has multiple dead games (though I'd be inclined to say that NCSoft has a poorer record than most), compared to Blizzard's singular title that's still doing well. kafziel mentioned S-E because, as a company that's still supporting all their titles, they're a noteworthy exception. I assumed from that context that Arthil mentioning Zenimax meant they had other MMO's I wasn't aware of. Not really sure why they'd be relevant otherwise, as there's a ton of companies with only one MMO that are still going. Off the top of my head, EVE Online, Runequest, Second Life, etc.
I wish I could say this surprised me. Just another box to tick on my 'Reasons to say Fuck You NCsoft' list.
I'm more just confused. Who the fuck thought that was a great idea? Given that CoX flopped in Korea, no one over there will care. And for people that know Statesman in the west, they're more likely to feel like NCsoft is spitting in their eye than anything else. Great job, marketing.
Of course, these are the people who think releasing a goddamn moba in an already over-saturated market in 20-fucking-17 is a great idea, so...
Well, it's a Smash Bros type "popular characters of our past IPs!" game character-wise, so it makes sense. I mean, Heroes of the Storm has the Lost Vikings in there- and yeah, I care about those characters, but I bet 99% of players have no idea where they even came from. Obscure characters make these kinds of games, otherwise you might as well call it Lineage Heroes and be done with it.
[edit] Ugh, I didn't even think about it, but with CoX IP embedded in another game there's now pretty much no chance they'll ever sell off the IP now. As little hope as there was before.
Glal on
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
There was a post on reddit about this. Someone commented about there having to be a reason for them to close COH. I let him know it actually was doing well when they closed it. Then he let loose this amazing quote;
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
There was a post on reddit about this. Someone commented about there having to be a reason for them to close COH. I let him know it actually was doing well when they closed it. Then he let loose this amazing quote;
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
Executives don't really give a shit what does well in other countries sometimes.
The same reason why Konami makes pachinko machines now.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
There was a post on reddit about this. Someone commented about there having to be a reason for them to close COH. I let him know it actually was doing well when they closed it. Then he let loose this amazing quote;
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
Yeah, I mean, after the Tabula Rasa debacle, there was a bit of a clearing house where NCSoft got rid of pretty much all their western studios, excepting Arenanet, Paragon, and Carbine. Guild Wars was a big part of the annual revenue, Paragon still had the Korean port of CoH in the works at that point, and Carbine... I like Wildstar, but I really feel that game's survival has largely been a sunk-cost fallacy. Once that Korean release of CoH fell through, the clock was ticking for Paragon. When NCSoft rejected the idea of attempting a CoH2 that was pretty much it even if Paragon didn't realize it. As far as I know there hasn't been a new western-made MMO published by NCSoft since, it's pretty much all been them exporting their domestic products internationally.
When a change in executive management occurs, it is not uncommon for them to kill any previous projects that aren't contributing a large portion of revenue in order to 'make space' for new projects that will be a part of their own legacy and mini-empire. If I'm remembering correctly this all went down around the time NCSoft was getting into a business relationship with Nexon (who has since sold all of their shares in NCSoft). CoH and Paragon were doing quite well, but were a drop in the bucket of NCSoft's operations, so even though there were very few resources that could be reclaimed and re-purposed once they'd made the decision to lay off most of the studio, it was still a negligible loss for them. The mistake that redditor is making is thinking that business decisions are exclusively logical assessments of an individual product's/service's profit margins, there's a lot more that goes into it.
Lastly, sometimes businesses don't want to expand in one way or another, or decide to trim off operations that they don't feel have much future potential even if they're doing well now. There are high-level business management reasons for it, but it's not a field I know much about, so I can't articulate that argument as well as the points above (which wasn't that great either, admittedly).
I mean, it was supposed to be a pretty comical and entertaining little thing. I figured the near irony of that comment spoke for itself.
It is basically the fact it took him that long to realize that fact that was exactly why everyone is so angry about the fate of COH
I understood why you posted it, sorry. It just got me thinking about it again and I wanted to try to put my understanding of things (such as they are) in writing.
Edit to add: and as far as being angry about it, not only did I compare NCSoft to Sauron in a previous post in this thread, but I'd originally intended to use Casablanca as an analogy (the publisher is the collaborationist French government, and studios like ArenaNet and Carbine are Rick's Café Américain), but besides being a tortured metaphor it'd also be an example of Godwin's Law so I held off.
Man, I dunno. Sauron gets a bad rap for a guy who makes master-work rings and hands them out as gifts.
He's also not the devil of Tolkien's world. Just the highest-ranking subordinate left after the Ainur finally got fed up with Morgoth's shit and dragged him away from the planet.
And like, I get why NCsoft wanted to sell the property.
But all they did was entertain one serious offer from... I think Disney? And when that fell through, they apparently went "eh fuck it just kill it" instead of trying to find another buyer, which is a remarkably callous decision to make over what was a decade old community at that point. Far more than their decision to sell the property, that was what pissed me off the most.
None of those are anywhere near as profitable as ESO/FFXIV and of course the big elephant in the room itself, WoW. That's why I mentioned Zenimax.
This is true, but FFXI still gets monthly updates. With new content. They aren't huge, necessarily, but there's stuff, and like an entire new high-end battle mode landed just in December?
There was a post on reddit about this. Someone commented about there having to be a reason for them to close COH. I let him know it actually was doing well when they closed it. Then he let loose this amazing quote;
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
A company isn't going to wait until a game is costing them money to shut it down, assuming the trend downwards is slow enough. Better to get now than risk losing cash by hoping the game continues to make paltry profits for another year.
The real ball buster is that they announced the shutdown having told the devs just hours prior. They had a big content patch in the works that was very close to completion, so having all that work for nothing is a pretty big fuck you.
I mean there didn't seem to be any sign of the game becoming unprofitable. They just axed it because it didn't do so well in Korea, yet it was thriving everywhere else.
the thing that's kinda interesting about CoH abruptly shuttering is that if it had been just a year or two later they probably would have just halted development and tried to milk the remaining players via microtransaction. They had a really good model for it too, the market just kinda wasn't ready for that kind of model (or at least they must have thought it wasn't.)
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There was a post on reddit about this. Someone commented about there having to be a reason for them to close COH. I let him know it actually was doing well when they closed it. Then he let loose this amazing quote;
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
A company isn't going to wait until a game is costing them money to shut it down, assuming the trend downwards is slow enough. Better to get now than risk losing cash by hoping the game continues to make paltry profits for another year.
The real ball buster is that they announced the shutdown having told the devs just hours prior. They had a big content patch in the works that was very close to completion, so having all that work for nothing is a pretty big fuck you.
Yeah, it wasn't a trend downwards. The game was seeing $2.5m a quarter in profit. One of their most profitable games, and going upwards.
the thing that's kinda interesting about CoH abruptly shuttering is that if it had been just a year or two later they probably would have just halted development and tried to milk the remaining players via microtransaction. They had a really good model for it too, the market just kinda wasn't ready for that kind of model (or at least they must have thought it wasn't.)
I really liked the F2P model they had going. It was fair to old players, gave new players plenty of content to enjoy and they were very good at actually releasing new content you wanted to pay for. CoX post F2P was the only game that managed to make me go "well, I'm saving $15 on a subscription, I might as well spend $15 on their shop stuff instead" consistently. I rarely if ever spend money on F2P games otherwise.
The two people I played with had basically had their subs running since the game came out until the very end, even when they weren't playing with months-long gaps.
The subscription was a super good deal towards the end too. I had a couple friends who wouldn't subscribe, but would wind up buying all the new stuff piecemeal, and I kept trying to explain that with all the new stories and power sets bundled into my subscription, plus all the store currency I got, I was getting all the same stuff for around $5/month less than they were buying it à la carte, but they insisted that any month now was going to be a dry spell in the store and the savings would even right out.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
I mean there didn't seem to be any sign of the game becoming unprofitable. They just axed it because it didn't do so well in Korea, yet it was thriving everywhere else.
According to what I've heard, when Paragon Studios was acquired by NCSoft, part of the contract was to create a second IP. They tried, and failed, three times to do so.
CoX was an amazing game, but even just watching it's development over time, there were some solid management problems at that studio. The Architect System and Base building, two of the most clamored-after parts of the game, never got updates because they didn't have any documentation on the underlying code, and people who looked at it were terrified to touch it for fear of everything falling apart. Remember those few weeks where base defenses were targeting anyone who came in, even if they were a registered member of the SG?
Not just code problems, but reading about the story/incarnate plans, etc etc in all the post-shutdown loredoc things, this makes it pretty easy for me to believe all the stuff about management failures being the real cause of the shutdown. When you throw bad management in the difficulties native to MMOs in general, yeah. Shutdown.
The subscription was a super good deal towards the end too. I had a couple friends who wouldn't subscribe, but would wind up buying all the new stuff piecemeal, and I kept trying to explain that with all the new stories and power sets bundled into my subscription, plus all the store currency I got, I was getting all the same stuff for around $5/month less than they were buying it à la carte, but they insisted that any month now was going to be a dry spell in the store and the savings would even right out.
To be fair, they were kind of right about the dry spell coming.
The fact that the game basically ran on the gossamer strands of dreamfibers was rather facepalming, yes.
It floors me that the entire development staff from some point onward were basically mages trying to plumb the mysteries of the arcane to make it do what they wanted.
The Architect system was getting regular updates until the very end. I know, because I was publishing story arcs for my rp group at least every other week. New maps, enemy groups, and options for existing tools were getting dropped on us with every issue. By the end, the only real Deep Mysteries left were the Base Builder, which was a morass of undocumented code left behind by some of the original City of Villains expansion team, and the Oil Slick Arrow power in Trick Archery, which was apparently at the root of a significant fraction of internal bug reports. On the other hand, it seemed like every other issue the powers team in particular was coming out and saying 'Remember that thing prior devs said could never ever happen? We made it happen anyway.' They had some brilliant people on the job at the end there, and downplaying their accomplishments is some real weak revisionist history nonsense.
We have some extremely well-documented insights into the toxic business culture of NCSoft, and especially their attitude towards their western subsidiaries, and I'm disinclined to accept any spin to the story that shifts blame to Paragon's leadership.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
You should really go read about Tabula Rasa's strained development, and remember that Garriott won a twenty-eight million dollar lawsuit against NCSoft over how they got rid of him.
Yeah, they wrote a whole fake goodbye letter from him. He wasn't still in space at that point, but he was in quarantine after returning. And they tried to forge this whole narrative where he departed voluntarily, instead of being fired, so they could deny him his stock options.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
It's true that base-building got abandoned, but that's something that was developed under Cryptic and abandoned under direct NCSoft control. Because it was coded entirely by one person, who didn't document, and then got moved over to Champions after I7. Remember that lengthy period when CoH was an in-house project in NCSoft, with a skeleton crew of 15 people total?
The early years of the game were a mismanaged nightmare, no doubt about it. Once Paragon Studios actually became a thing, it really seemed like they really got their act together in terms of CoH, but short of recoding the entire base system from scratch, it didn't sound like it could really be salvaged? I mean, look at how much work ended up going into fixing the Rise to the Challenge taunt problem.
kafziel on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Yeah, they wrote a whole fake goodbye letter from him. He wasn't still in space at that point, but he was in quarantine after returning. And they tried to forge this whole narrative where he departed voluntarily, instead of being fired, so they could deny him his stock options.
The sheer levels of illegality that sounds like is astronomical.
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Nope, but ESO is doing surprisingly well, a new expansion comes out this summer.
I'm more just confused. Who the fuck thought that was a great idea? Given that CoX flopped in Korea, no one over there will care. And for people that know Statesman in the west, they're more likely to feel like NCsoft is spitting in their eye than anything else. Great job, marketing.
Of course, these are the people who think releasing a goddamn moba in an already over-saturated market in 20-fucking-17 is a great idea, so...
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
[edit] Ugh, I didn't even think about it, but with CoX IP embedded in another game there's now pretty much no chance they'll ever sell off the IP now. As little hope as there was before.
"Why would they shut down a game that was making them money? That's not logical."
Executives don't really give a shit what does well in other countries sometimes.
The same reason why Konami makes pachinko machines now.
Yeah, I mean, after the Tabula Rasa debacle, there was a bit of a clearing house where NCSoft got rid of pretty much all their western studios, excepting Arenanet, Paragon, and Carbine. Guild Wars was a big part of the annual revenue, Paragon still had the Korean port of CoH in the works at that point, and Carbine... I like Wildstar, but I really feel that game's survival has largely been a sunk-cost fallacy. Once that Korean release of CoH fell through, the clock was ticking for Paragon. When NCSoft rejected the idea of attempting a CoH2 that was pretty much it even if Paragon didn't realize it. As far as I know there hasn't been a new western-made MMO published by NCSoft since, it's pretty much all been them exporting their domestic products internationally.
When a change in executive management occurs, it is not uncommon for them to kill any previous projects that aren't contributing a large portion of revenue in order to 'make space' for new projects that will be a part of their own legacy and mini-empire. If I'm remembering correctly this all went down around the time NCSoft was getting into a business relationship with Nexon (who has since sold all of their shares in NCSoft). CoH and Paragon were doing quite well, but were a drop in the bucket of NCSoft's operations, so even though there were very few resources that could be reclaimed and re-purposed once they'd made the decision to lay off most of the studio, it was still a negligible loss for them. The mistake that redditor is making is thinking that business decisions are exclusively logical assessments of an individual product's/service's profit margins, there's a lot more that goes into it.
Lastly, sometimes businesses don't want to expand in one way or another, or decide to trim off operations that they don't feel have much future potential even if they're doing well now. There are high-level business management reasons for it, but it's not a field I know much about, so I can't articulate that argument as well as the points above (which wasn't that great either, admittedly).
It is basically the fact it took him that long to realize that fact that was exactly why everyone is so angry about the fate of COH
I understood why you posted it, sorry. It just got me thinking about it again and I wanted to try to put my understanding of things (such as they are) in writing.
Edit to add: and as far as being angry about it, not only did I compare NCSoft to Sauron in a previous post in this thread, but I'd originally intended to use Casablanca as an analogy (the publisher is the collaborationist French government, and studios like ArenaNet and Carbine are Rick's Café Américain), but besides being a tortured metaphor it'd also be an example of Godwin's Law so I held off.
I'd compare them to something actively malicious, like the implementation of daylight savings time.
He's also not the devil of Tolkien's world. Just the highest-ranking subordinate left after the Ainur finally got fed up with Morgoth's shit and dragged him away from the planet.
But all they did was entertain one serious offer from... I think Disney? And when that fell through, they apparently went "eh fuck it just kill it" instead of trying to find another buyer, which is a remarkably callous decision to make over what was a decade old community at that point. Far more than their decision to sell the property, that was what pissed me off the most.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Probably the truest thing said in the last few pages.
I should read the title of this thread more often to keep myself grounded.
3DS Friend Code: 2707-1614-5576
PAX Prime 2014 Buttoneering!
This is true, but FFXI still gets monthly updates. With new content. They aren't huge, necessarily, but there's stuff, and like an entire new high-end battle mode landed just in December?
The real ball buster is that they announced the shutdown having told the devs just hours prior. They had a big content patch in the works that was very close to completion, so having all that work for nothing is a pretty big fuck you.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yeah, it wasn't a trend downwards. The game was seeing $2.5m a quarter in profit. One of their most profitable games, and going upwards.
*sigh*
According to what I've heard, when Paragon Studios was acquired by NCSoft, part of the contract was to create a second IP. They tried, and failed, three times to do so.
CoX was an amazing game, but even just watching it's development over time, there were some solid management problems at that studio. The Architect System and Base building, two of the most clamored-after parts of the game, never got updates because they didn't have any documentation on the underlying code, and people who looked at it were terrified to touch it for fear of everything falling apart. Remember those few weeks where base defenses were targeting anyone who came in, even if they were a registered member of the SG?
Not just code problems, but reading about the story/incarnate plans, etc etc in all the post-shutdown loredoc things, this makes it pretty easy for me to believe all the stuff about management failures being the real cause of the shutdown. When you throw bad management in the difficulties native to MMOs in general, yeah. Shutdown.
To be fair, they were kind of right about the dry spell coming.
It floors me that the entire development staff from some point onward were basically mages trying to plumb the mysteries of the arcane to make it do what they wanted.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
We have some extremely well-documented insights into the toxic business culture of NCSoft, and especially their attitude towards their western subsidiaries, and I'm disinclined to accept any spin to the story that shifts blame to Paragon's leadership.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
The early years of the game were a mismanaged nightmare, no doubt about it. Once Paragon Studios actually became a thing, it really seemed like they really got their act together in terms of CoH, but short of recoding the entire base system from scratch, it didn't sound like it could really be salvaged? I mean, look at how much work ended up going into fixing the Rise to the Challenge taunt problem.
Second, goddamn it NCSoft.
Third, you're absolutely right. There's enough MOBAs right now and this is just a way to further poison the super hero video game well.
The sheer levels of illegality that sounds like is astronomical.