pleasedontsqueezethegreymatter:
Last Friday, NCsoft announced that it would halt development on City of Heroes effective immediately, and shut down the servers for good at the end of November. This came as a shock to everyone, most of all the people at developer Paragon Studios, some of whom had been excitedly advertising things only weeks away from release as recently as the day before. They came to work on Friday and were basically told, “we’re shutting down the game. You’re all fired. Be moved out of the office by the end of the day, and don’t forget to tell the players before you lock up.”
Hard data is tough to find, but the latest estimates indicate two things:
1. NCsoft lost $6 million last quarter, primarily due to the under-performance of properties such as Lineage and Aion. Neither of which is on the chopping block.
2. City of Heroes brought in $10 million in profits over the past year.
If my math is right, that means that shutting down CoH is going to INCREASE those losses. By about $2.5 million per quarter. And that’s not even counting the losses they’ll suffer due to how many MMO players they’ve now alienated, particularly with the way they’ve treated the dev team at Paragon Studios. Which the players aren’t going to let anyone forget, I promise. Treat your employees like crap, and even if they have to take it lying down, we don’t. Treat your customers like crap, and we’ll resist. We’re going to make noise. We’re going to write letters. We’re going to get the word out about this. We’re going to make sure every gamer in the world knows how little their support and your own employees mean to you, NCsoft. We’re going to fight to save our city, because that’s what heroes do.
In less than a week, we’ve amassed over eleven thousand signatures from players who refuse to go down without a fight.
And while it’s still too early to tell if our efforts will bear any fruit, NCsoft is at least listening. Now is the time to act. Don’t let them up off the mat — fight for your city. Fight for our City. If you haven’t signed the petition, sign it now. If you have a CoH account, log in and use it. If you don’t, it’s free — give it a try.
The players deserve better than this. The developers deserve better than this. Paragon City deserves better than this.