Much nostalgia.

I wonder if there will be cinematics like that in CoT ? :) Where we'll see famous heroes to admire like Miss Liberty, psychée or Captain idontrememerhisname ^^

As I play armchair quarterback on the "Why did they kill COX?" question, I think the decision came from the sum total of a number of smaller issues, not any one major problem.

1. Given the mindset of the people who owned it, the options on the table were basically either kill it or keep it. I don't believe the theory that selling it to someone else was ever seriously considered. I don't know much about Eastern culture and mores, but selling your business to someone else so that they can then, in theory, run it better than you did and make more money is something to be avoided for the public shame factor alone. If you think it's POSSIBLE that such could happen, you either keep the game and make that money yourself or kill it and cut your losses, you don't show everyone how incompetent you are by selling it to someone else and watching them make a good run of it. On the other side of that coin, if you sell it and the buyer doesn't make money and it still dies, you've now gained a reputation as a seller of "bad" intellectual property and future partners and buyers will be wary. It's like in sports trading a player you know is not as good as their name recognition would suggest for a bunch of draft picks. The person who gets the draft picks is usually the winner of that trade, long term, and the team that gets the aging star always feels the sting of "we've been had", or at least they hear that sentiment from their fans. So selling out is a no-win scenario, you're either selling a star player who is worth keeping or you're selling damaged goods to whomever is dumb enough to offer you value in return for it, and in either case you lose something. The WORST case scenario woul dhave been if they had sold out to some crappy company that tried to twist the playerbase's "udder" for eery last cent they could until it truly died. I'm at least happy THAT didn't happen.

2. Its my guess that the plan all along had been for the game to run for 5-10 years then be replaced by CoX2, which they made sure they legally retained the rights to. I mean, graphics were a lot better in 2012 than they were in 2004, and the game would have needed a big upgrade in that department, which would only have been accomplished by making of CoX2. The only problem was, CoX, although profitable, was not making enough money to justify investing in CoX2. CoX was paying for itself and a little extra, but not enough extra to make a CoX2.

3. Revenues were still in the black, but they were decreasing over time. I think the game made less money overall after it went F2P than it had been making as a sub-only game in it's first few years. That's not a good sign. It's better to kill it BEFORE you get to the point where you're operating it at a loss as opposed to after.

4. The idea of opportunity cost came up in the video, but I personally don't buy that. I mean, if they had retained the services of the vast majority of the people responsible for making and maintaining CoX, then I could see it. As I understand it, the whole CoX team was just axed, weren't they? As such, there was no opportunity cost, everyone making COX was either making COX or gone, it's not like they needed those people in other areas making other games. The only opportunity cost was that the upper level execs needed to think and talk about CoX now and then, which was probably part of their workday they felt wasn't worth it.

5. They wanted the other games they were launching at the time to be be smash hit successes right out of the gate, as any company does. Since many gamers don't play more than one game at a time, killing CoX made sense insofar as it gave the gamers one less option at a time when they really wanted GW2 to be widely adopted by the fans of MMO games. While alienating a lot of CoX fans, many of whom were like "NOT BUYING NCSOFT EVER AGAIN", they were still "getting out of their own way" in the sense that the gaming public at large, many of who thought CoX was dead before it actually died, no longer had any reason, officially, to buy or play CoX. For the new players coming up into the market, this meant less competition which in turn meant more people buying GW2, in theory.

6. To NCSoft, it had become their "The Ramones". To explain that, The Ramones were a punk band of the 1980s which though wildly popular in some countries, never gained AS MUCH popularity in the US as they had worldwide. Oddly, this band which had cut its teeth playing Bowery bars in NYC like CBGB's couldn't quite hit "superstardom" in their own country, despite being THAT big in some others. Just as the US audience never really appreciated The Ramones, at least not while they were touring and making records, the Korean gamer audience never really liked CoX that much, and ultimately it was Korean business people making the decisions. So despite how much we all loved CoX, they just didn't get it. It's easier to kill a project when you personally don't get why other people like it so much.

Responding to Radiac:

1. I strongly believed that there was a "someone will lose face if they sell it, that's why they're twisting the knife" factor at the time it was happening. Almost certainly they weren't serious about selling it, or they would have said something in a press release (nothing drives up bids like buyers thinking they've got competition). (There's also the logistical issue that the servers and account infrastructure were NCSoft property, not Paragon's, and would have required nontrivial work to transfer.)

2. The game got a significant graphics upgrade in COH: Freedom. It was really noticeable in Praetoria. The devs frequently bragged about their "Type-R Coders" on the team. But everyone still had mitten hands.

4. Paragon wasn't told until August 31 that the axe had fallen, and that was their last day and their dev access, even on the forums, were locked out. There were job fairs held over the next couple days. That dev team was dissolved super fast; they didn't do that when Tabula Rasa was axed* at the end of November 2008. Positron mentioned that this wasn't something they expected, and he had just approved an art package for the next issue the day before.

5. They were handing out free accounts for Aion with the shutdown of Tabula Rasa. Goes to pattern, Your Honor.

6. Same with Tabula Rasa. When they killed it, they cut ties with the Garriotts (Richard's brother had been brought on to manage their North American efforts, not just Tabula Rasa) and even issued a false statement from Richard Garriott along with the shutdown announcement while Richard was in Kazakhstan in quarantine before his Soyuz trip.

So yeah, I don't expect a non-Korean property to ever fare well in NCSoft's hands. And I'm thoroughly not interested in Korean MMOs.

* That took three months (servers went down for the last time at the end of February 2009) and the devs stayed on more or less until the end. They even took some in-development work and pushed it out hotfix-style before the last day, and some devs that had already left came back for the last day to spawn mobs all over the place for folks to shoot and have one last big party on the New York map.

SisterSilicon wrote:

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
4. Paragon wasn't told until August 31 that the axe had fallen, and that was their last day and their dev access, even on the forums, were locked out. There were job fairs held over the next couple days. That dev team was dissolved super fast; they didn't do that when Tabula Rasa was axed* at the end of November 2008. Positron mentioned that this wasn't something they expected, and he had just approved an art package for the next issue the day before.
I seem to recall their Twitter account announcing a power set unlock code giveaway that very morning.

WAs it a power set, or the Kirby Dots effect? I seem to remember those two things happening in fairly short timeframe, the Kirby Dots thing and the big shutdown announcement.