The CoH/V community is making the loudest noise I can remember seeing in trying to save their title, getting 14 613 signatures in less than a week at the time of writing. Continue reading
Tagged with NCsoft …
That “Cryptic’s Licensing of Its Engine Is Shutting Down CoH/V…” Rumour
I’m aware that for a lot of CoH/V players “Blame Jack Emmert / Cryptic Studios” is the default position when anything goes wrong, but I don’t see this rumour really being backed by the truth. Continue reading
City of Heroes / Villains: An End of the World Event
I was surprised to see a large spike in my site traffic today, especially to older posts about how many players CoH/V had. Then I looked further and saw that NCsoft announced its intentions to shut down CoH/V and Paragon Studios. This has taken a lot of people by surprise, given that it seemed that … Continue reading
Great MMO Collapses of Our Time – Destination Games
You can get excited now, because if you picked this option, you’ve decided to back Destination Games! Destination Games Game That Destroyed Them: Tabula Rasa Studio Launch Date: April 2000 Studio Closure Date: 28 February 2009 Invested In By: NCsoft Estimated Money Blown: US$106m Cause of Death: Restarting the project, internal culture of fear and secrecy, … Continue reading
City of Heroes / Villains: A Limited Bounce
When the first quarter of financial data landed following City of Heroes / Villains conversion to a free-to-play model, it showed a positive-if-only-moderate bump from 2812 million Won (or US$2.41m) in Q3 2011 to 3435 million Won (or US$2.97m) in Q4 2011. Going F2P saw about a 20% jump in revenue. It certainly wasn’t in … Continue reading
How Many Players Did City of Heroes / Villains Have After Launching Freedom?
Converting from a pure subscription-based title to a hybrid free-to-play (F2P) is something than more than one MMO title has seen happen. And generally the indication from the studio is that such a move makes mad bank. When Cryptic Studios converted Champions Online to F2P, they said revenue went up 1000%; when Turbine Studios converted … Continue reading
How Many Players Did City of Heroes / Villains Have Before Launching Freedom?
In the rush before Xmas, I missed NCsoft’s investor relations release for the Q3 2011 period. NCsoft is unique among MMO developers in that its quarterly earnings releases include a breakdown of revenue collected from each of their key titles in that period, making it very easy to track how a title is performing. Although … Continue reading
City of Heroes / Villains: The Killing of Statesman, And Where We Go From Here
Back in December, Paragon Studios spoilered their own story when they publicly announced that Statesman would be the one to die in the “Who Will Die?” signature story arc. That Statesman is apparently dying in part 5 of what I believe to be a 7 part story arc raises my Eyebrow of Cynicism +3 – … Continue reading
Reading the MMO Tea Leaves for 2012
In previous years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing and writing up a year’s worth of Massively.com / other MMO sites news articles. Although this is very useful from an information point of view (particularly the “oh, I’d forgotten about that” articles) it takes a very long time. So, this year I’m still doing … Continue reading
Reviewing My 2011 MMO Predictions
Time to see how right I was back when I wrote the following predictions about how things would turn MMO-wise in 2011. F2P titles continue to enter the market and other existing MMOs are likely to join them. Warhammer Online is a distinct possibility, as are titles in the position of Vanguard and Fallen Earth: … Continue reading
World Class Villains 