How much is riding on City of Heroes: Going Rogue?

by Eliot Lefebvre on Nov 2nd 2009 8:00PM

Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Business models, Expansions, MMO industry, Opinion

At the six-year mark, City of Heroes is still moving forward, with City of Heroes: Going Rogue targeted for release in the second quarter of 2010. It's certainly not the oldest game to receive an expansion, but Vicarious Existence has an interesting point to be made: exactly how much is riding on the success of this expansion? In true heroic sense, it may well be the fate of NCsoft West and of NCsoft's entire western presence in the market.

It's no secret that NCsoft West has had a difficult time in the market, with the first rumbles having been made clear with the sad tale of Auto Assault. And it's hardly necessary to dredge up painful memories about the games that have also gone the way of the dodo. But as the post points out, there's not nearly as much revenue coming in from the western branch of the company as they'd like, even with the success Aion has been having in the marketplace. (If that sounds cynical or as if it's expecting too much money, Adam Martin has an excellent explanation of why NCsoft could and would be so draconic about profits.) To be fair, the post is a bit alarmist, but it does posit that there could be a great deal of trouble on the horizon for City of Heroes -- and perhaps the whole studio -- based on the performance of the expansion. And even if the idle speculation is wrong, it certainly does put you in the right mood for the expansion, doesn't it?

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Tags: adam-martin, aion, auto-assault, business-models, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, coh, cov, cox, expansions, going-rogue, ncsoft, ncsoft-west, paragon-studios

Reader Comments (23)

Its a nice change of pace, you usually troll mine :p

The fact that you insult me and I do not continues thought.....

You come in on an article that discusses how unreliable NCSoft is in holding games and how its games are more at risk from NCSoft itself than any other competitor to troll about CO success, not really relevant.

sorry if your insecurity makes you feel that way, but games can coexist and their interaction is in many ways, levels and depths that X game will steal X subscribers from our game and so on, how I feel CO influenced CoH is stated above (in a positive for the player base way if you need the really short resume) and I expect it to affect CO the same way, competition drives the things forward and all that.

Back on topic, I am afraid that the article is right and CoH is in more peril from NCSoft than anyone else, they do not seem to grasp the concept of MMO and are unwilling to keep MMOs that just survive and not meet their (usually outrageous) standards, any MMO is at better hands than in NCSofts hands because, when the developers do not have way too much money, they try to make the game better and keep it alive, it will recover from a bad launch and steadily work its way up, with NCSoft it will just die and something else will pop up.

As NCSoft doesn't publish numbers, it's hard to say that TR was self-sustaining or not.

For a moment, let's assume that it was at a break even point (self-sustaining). Any attempt to move it beyond that point of being "self sustaining" would have required more resources (costs) to the company. All of which for a gamble.

If you read this post from last year, you begin to get a sense of the situation: http://www.massively.com/2008/06/06/tabula-rasa-goes-awol-from-q1-ncsoft-financial-reports/

Without seeing the detailed numbers, there's no way that you or I can really know how much money NCSoft was bleeding on TR at the time (or how bad the sub-drain was). So, in the end, they decided better to bite the bullet and take their losses, than try to double down and possibly extend their losses.

Especially consider this. If they'd just left the game essentially "stagnant", with a skeleton dev crew. The community would have howled about how the game was "abandoned", and it wouldn't have gained any ground under those circumstances.

In the end, it appears to be a lose, lose proposition for NCSoft, with the only way to make it "work" would be to invest yet more serious money, on the off chance that they could overcome the catastrophic launch.

I would like to point out that TR is a "special case" as the lawsuit with RG shows, they were far more interested in taking RG shares and kill DG than keep the game sustainable, they effectively killed the entire studio overnight the moment RG broke and sold his shares to NCSoft.

TR in my belief and the small research I did was "breaking even" it had enough players to pay development and keep the servers up and if they wanted to make it less costly they could merge the four servers into one, its cancellation before a year passed just before they made the big push with the "return to earth" expansion and when population was climbing again back was illogical except if they never wanted the game to launch in the first place and puled the plug as soon as they could (it is no secret TR was made be because DG pushed the strings) and yes TR population was remarkably big considering there was hardly any advertising from the publisher NCSoft.

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