i just checked out the paragon studios main website, and noticed they are hiring a concept artist for a "next gen" MMO. so it sounds like they are going to be put on a new game.
They've actually been working on a "secret project" for some time. Everyone assumed it was going to be CoH2.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
i just checked out the paragon studios main website, and noticed they are hiring a concept artist for a "next gen" MMO. so it sounds like they are going to be put on a new game.
From what I understand, most of Paragon's staff only found out today, likely including the hiring people.
They thought that they at least had months of development. Then they found out their division was being shut down when they read it in the news.
Interesting to see this happen to COH. I had an argument a few months back with a member of my ofrmer fleet, basically he argued that no AAA MMO (developed in the West or America) had ever closed its doors. he had asked me to name three, but not SWG, for some reason.
1. Earth and Beyond
2. SWG
3. Acheron 2
4. Tabula Rasa
5. COH
Are the five best examples I can think of. Now, what does this have to do with STO?
The COH story has nothing to do with it. However, the 2nd Quarter Report for Perfect World does not paint a rosey picture.
It is becoming pretty obvious, the Cryptic Store is not enough to turn a profit and the lack of new content (playable factions ie. Romulans or Cardassians) will not sustain STO for more than a year or two (my opinion).
Interesting to see this happen to COH. I had an argument a few months back with a member of my ofrmer fleet, basically he argued that no AAA MMO (developed in the West or America) had ever closed its doors. he had asked me to name three, but not SWG, for some reason.
1. Earth and Beyond
2. SWG
3. Acheron 2
4. Tabula Rasa
5. COH
Are the five best examples I can think of. Now, what does this have to do with STO?
The COH story has nothing to do with it. However, the 2nd Quarter Report for Perfect World does not paint a rosey picture.
It is becoming pretty obvious, the Cryptic Store is not enough to turn a profit and the lack of new content (playable factions ie. Romulans or Cardassians) will not sustain STO for more than a year or two (my opinion).
I wouldn't count SWG as it never "failed." It was closed for branding reasons. And last I heard, after TOR's issues, LucasArts was prepared to let fans bring it back via legit private servers.
Most of the others people mention died of development costs and collapsed shortly after launch or their closure pre-dates WoW.
Post-WoW/CoH, games that don't go overboard on development budget (ie. have enough budget to take their time breaking even post-launch) but still manage to brand themselves as AAA don't fail.
Where this is doubly revolutionary is that this is the first big failure of F2P to grow a game. They didn't experience sizable gains from F2P.
In turn, NCSoft seems determined to focus on big investment/big return MMOs... Which doesn't include CoH. That was something like a $30 million game created by around 25 devs.
NCSoft's reasoning there is suspect. Conventional wisdom right now is that spending over $100 million on an MMO is a bad idea. NCSoft seems determined to double down on that approach though and wants its money supporting those titles.
You guys might have heard about Paragon Studios and City of Heroes/Villains closing down, how does this make the guys at Cryptic, who put a decent amount of work into that game, feel about it closing down?
Based on a statement BaBs made on the CoH forum, he's not aware of any 5-year limitation on the engine license. If anything Cryptic has just lost another source of revenue - the fee NCSoft paid them for using the engine.
I don't think Cryptic pulled it. I do recall buzz that NCSoft wasn't thrilled about handing Cryptic a check while Cryptic had a rival game.
Most of the Cryptic staff that was working on CoH stayed with CoH when Cryptic sold their 50% to NCSoft. Outside of Jack, and some other Cryptic Founders, there's probably not a lot of people working on STO that worked on CoH.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Lego: Universe closed its doors after about a year. That's the biggest failure I can think of that hasn't been mentioned. Now that game was badly targeted; aiming a game at the demographic with the lowest income, children. They could ask their parents for the game but those parents don't understand why a game needs further payment. From playing it it little more than a retail non-mmo lego game but with less content because you rely on others to want to play. Even at launch I couldn't play a racing quest because of lack of players (it only needed 4 iirc). I digress, but suffice to say it was a clear disaster to me.
SWG felt dated and on it's last legs when I played it but it was still fun even at the end.
Lego: Universe closed its doors after about a year. That's the biggest failure I can think of that hasn't been mentioned. Now that game was badly targeted; aiming a game at the demographic with the lowest income, children. They could ask their parents for the game but those parents don't understand why a game needs further payment. From playing it it little more than a retail non-mmo lego game but with less content because you rely on others to want to play. Even at launch I couldn't play a racing quest because of lack of players (it only needed 4 iirc). I digress, but suffice to say it was a clear disaster to me.
SWG felt dated and on it's last legs when I played it but it was still fun even at the end.
Is that really an MMORPG or just a sandbox MMO? Do you count Second Life? What about Ultima? What about the Sims Online?
I was thinking of Matrix Online too, though I never got to play it.
APB? The original release lasted all of 3 months before the doors closed. Quite embarrassing and it miffed quite a few of us. The latest incarnation is just another lockbox farm.
You can now put together a list of five AAA MMOs that closed down without looking at any publisher other than NCSoft. I'd call this a trend; glad Cryptic got out when they did.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
It comes down to money spent on **** and GW2 from what I hear. And that NCSoft decided to double down on those rather than support a game that is stable but not necessarily huge, at around 150k players. (It may also indicate F2P isn't guaranteed to boost your numbers. CoH has been hovering around that number for 8 years.)
The lesson? Enough "WoW killers" and WoW will take a hit... but that doesn't mean that you're profitable.
CoH was never made to be a "WoW Killer" since it was release before WoW.
___________________
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
Is that really an MMORPG or just a sandbox MMO? Do you count Second Life? What about Ultima? What about the Sims Online?
Sims Online was nothing more than a glorified avatar chat room. I'm glad they let beta testers invite friends so I got a beta from a friend and knew not to go near that POS with a ten foot pole.
___________________
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
I don't think Cryptic pulled it. I do recall buzz that NCSoft wasn't thrilled about handing Cryptic a check while Cryptic had a rival game.
It would be a disastrous business decision to pull the license like that. Yeah, by pulling the license, they eliminate a competitor.. but they also eliminate any kind of confidence in their brand, which is more important. Other companies and development houses would see PWE as toxic if they did that. If PWE will do that to NC, what would stop them from doing it to anyone else? No, as ruthless as PWE is, they are too smart for that.
NC on the other hand, has shut down at least seven games at varying levels of development and profitability. CoH may have been barely more than a blip on the radar next to NCs big games, but it was still healthy and profitable, especially by western standards.
I think this is NC. They took a huge loss over the last year because of that game that starts with "A", and they may have shut down Paragon in order to use it as a tax writeoff.
Also, many of you may not know this, but CoH was not the only game Paragon had in active development. They had another, unnamed project in development for at least a year, and I seriously doubt that was using the Cryptic engine. There would be no reason to also can that game if CoH was having licensing issues.
So licensing issues are unlikely, and CoH was profitable...
No, this has nothing to do with PWE, and everything to do with NC and its long history of culling games that aren't doing precisely as well as they want, even if they are profitable, and CoH was making around $10 million a year profit.
♪ I'm going around not in circles but in spirographs.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
Not being funny, but isn't the Cryptic Engine new since Cryptic and CoH parted ways? Pretty sure it is...anyway shuffling to Ten Forward as this isn't STO related.
Very sad to hear. It was my first MMO and i had a blast playing it. 8 years is a decent run for an MMO, and probably longer than they expected when it first came out. It got me into MMO's (and i had to be persuaded to try it) and its possible if i had not played it my views and expectations on STO might have been different.
no one is safe in todays economy and any game should shut its doors at anytime for a number of reasons so if you have an MMO or more that you enjoy, dont take it for granted as there is no guarantee it will be around forever.
When Paragon was spun off into its own entity, I'm sure it took with it certain rights to the engine. I don't think Cryptic could just "pull the plug" especially when you consider how popular the game was.
I think this is a good, old fashioned "going under". It happens when Expenses > Income.
"If you have never used Cello, I'm not interested in your browser opinion."
___________________________
In game: Commadore_Bob; Joined Jul 2009; That post count + 20,000
I am no MMO expert - in fact STO is my first and only MMO - but I get the impression that for all the grousing and doomsday prediction that's done here, STO is doing pretty well.
It wasn't all that long ago that IIRC PWE stated that STO was their #1 money-maker (not sure on that, don't quote me). And PWE is, so far as I know, a fairly big company. Plus, they were able to find a buyer for STO in the first place. Add into this the fact that there are a lot of Trek nerds out there, and a lot of them don't have qualms with STO being focused on blowing things up, and the fact that IIRC Star Trek Vegas showed that a lot of people don't even know about STO yet - a lot of potential customers, and you've got a pretty good potential customer base. Furthermore, STO seems to attract a much older age bracket than a lot of MMO's - older people with a few bucks to throw around here and there that high schoolers and starving college students don't necessarily have. This, I imagine, is a relatively untapped market.
It's easy to forget that STO has essentially been being kicked in the face since BEFORE day 1. They had to rush the game out the door after picking up a few scraps of stuff to base a game on from another company. They had serious problems at launch, and things got worse as the cash stream from Atari dried up to a trickle sufficient to keep the lights on and not much else. They had to contend with a very small team throughout much of this. They were sold off and then they spent several months revamping the game's innards for F2P, and the company's innards, after being purchased. This seems to be the first period wherein they've got a fair amount of stability since... well, ever.
There is a concern that PWE's brands supposedly tend to last about 5 years, but Star Trek is an existing "big name" brand, and one that's got movies coming out, at that. Plus this has revitalized the Prime universe - and aside from the books is probably the only source of Prime universe material this side of fanfic that we're going to be getting, possibly from now on. The prospects of an 'alternate' MMO for Star Trek aren't looking too great for a variety of reasons, either, including the current MMO market overall, plus I doubt that a hyper-canon Star Trek iteration would appeal to any sizeable number of MMO-goers (could be wrong though).
I think the largest problems STO faces are 1) content and 2) monetization. I believe that 1) will be solved as best as possible given the relatively small team size, but it's going to take time. 2) we are seeing in things such as the Starbase system. It will be trial and error for some time, although I suspect that it may mean that we see more subscriber perks cropping in, since although subs aren't a gold mine they ARE steady cash, or at least a large one-time infusion of money. The lockboxes are not going away because they will continue to be a consistent hit for cash, and they help to keep the lights on, as much vitriol as comes from them; however, they will also continue to evolve.
Unfortunately, however, this closure is a reminder of the inherent mortality of an MMO. I do believe that this will be the only MMO I will play, as I'd rather not get attached to another one. So it will probably be my first, last and only, although I hope STO goes on for a loooong while.
(Disclaimer - I am NOT an expert at MMOs, once again, for all I know every last word of this is wrong)
Is that really an MMORPG or just a sandbox MMO? Do you count Second Life? What about Ultima? What about the Sims Online?
As I understand it Lego Universe was an odd duck anyway. I'm pretty sure that expectations and what was delivered were lightyears apart.
From what I recall, Lego Universe was a fairly standard MMO in a lot of ways - and therein lies the problem. If I hear 'Lego MMO' I am going to expect to be able to take a bunch of virtual bricks, slap them together, and drive off in my (probably poorly built) brick-buggy and do... something or other. I would not expect it to be the exact same thing as everything else (in a general sense, e.g. everything is pre-built and you can only "build" things through conventional crafting) except the world is a bunch of lego bricks and my toons are lego people. Note that I am aware of the inherent problems with such as there are all kinds of things one can build with lego bricks that you wouldn't want your 6 year old seeing once, let alone on a daily basis, the wisdom of giving a 6 year old MMO access aside, but the image of being able to use legos in a Lego MMO is still something I would expect.
This is made worse when one accounts that at least some of this is entirely possible to do, even without the resources of a major company, particularly if you have smaller servers springing up that are administered by smaller groups. Examples include Roblox and Minecraft (sort of). Building with virtual Legos itself without the online component is hardly new - although not fancy, fans have been working on that since the 1990s!
So long story short, according to everything I know about Lego Universe, it was such an odd case all that it really says, at least to ME, is "don't deliver on something that is almost completely different from what your fans expect." I don't think STO qualifies.
Edit: Fixed grammar/wording that was done at a bad time.
It wasn't all that long ago that IIRC PWE stated that STO was their #1 money-maker (not sure on that, don't quote me). And PWE is, so far as I know, a fairly big company.
That information is actually not accurate. Dstahl posted on the forum that recently STO became PWE's largest MMO in North America - which does not include South America, Europe, Oceania, or Asia. PWE's Asian market makes their North American market look like a finch in a land of ostriches.
That's not to say that STO isn't doing financially well - for example, we know their staff has more then doubled since PWE took over - but doing well isn't the same thing as being a "#1 money-maker."
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
When Paragon was spun off into its own entity, I'm sure it took with it certain rights to the engine. I don't think Cryptic could just "pull the plug" especially when you consider how popular the game was.
I think this is a good, old fashioned "going under". It happens when Expenses > Income.
Except expenses weren't greater than income. I already said that. CoH was healthy. They were pulling in millions per year profit. That said, it was barely a blip on the radar next to Lineage, and that game that starts with "A"? It lost about 10 times more subs than CoH even HAS. CoH, while profitable and healthy, was a rounding error over at NC.
♪ I'm going around not in circles but in spirographs.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
Comments
From what I understand, most of Paragon's staff only found out today, likely including the hiring people.
They thought that they at least had months of development. Then they found out their division was being shut down when they read it in the news.
1. Earth and Beyond
2. SWG
3. Acheron 2
4. Tabula Rasa
5. COH
Are the five best examples I can think of. Now, what does this have to do with STO?
The COH story has nothing to do with it. However, the 2nd Quarter Report for Perfect World does not paint a rosey picture.
It is becoming pretty obvious, the Cryptic Store is not enough to turn a profit and the lack of new content (playable factions ie. Romulans or Cardassians) will not sustain STO for more than a year or two (my opinion).
Master The UnNamed Company
http://unnamedcompany.guildlaunch.com
I wouldn't count SWG as it never "failed." It was closed for branding reasons. And last I heard, after TOR's issues, LucasArts was prepared to let fans bring it back via legit private servers.
Most of the others people mention died of development costs and collapsed shortly after launch or their closure pre-dates WoW.
Post-WoW/CoH, games that don't go overboard on development budget (ie. have enough budget to take their time breaking even post-launch) but still manage to brand themselves as AAA don't fail.
Where this is doubly revolutionary is that this is the first big failure of F2P to grow a game. They didn't experience sizable gains from F2P.
In turn, NCSoft seems determined to focus on big investment/big return MMOs... Which doesn't include CoH. That was something like a $30 million game created by around 25 devs.
NCSoft's reasoning there is suspect. Conventional wisdom right now is that spending over $100 million on an MMO is a bad idea. NCSoft seems determined to double down on that approach though and wants its money supporting those titles.
I don't think Cryptic pulled it. I do recall buzz that NCSoft wasn't thrilled about handing Cryptic a check while Cryptic had a rival game.
Here's a map to show how much they've screwed up the game map.
SWG felt dated and on it's last legs when I played it but it was still fun even at the end.
Is that really an MMORPG or just a sandbox MMO? Do you count Second Life? What about Ultima? What about the Sims Online?
What about The Matrix Online? AAA title?
I was thinking of Matrix Online too, though I never got to play it.
APB? The original release lasted all of 3 months before the doors closed. Quite embarrassing and it miffed quite a few of us. The latest incarnation is just another lockbox farm.
*SIGH*
Well, I guess I'll be playing STO more then.
You can now put together a list of five AAA MMOs that closed down without looking at any publisher other than NCSoft. I'd call this a trend; glad Cryptic got out when they did.
CoH was raking in millions of dollars a year. It was healthy and profitable. The decision to close it is.. perplexing.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
Apparently F2P wasn't working out quite as well as their publisher had hoped for.
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
CoH was never made to be a "WoW Killer" since it was release before WoW.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
Sad their numbers you linked still put STO to shame when it was a sub based only game.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
Sims Online was nothing more than a glorified avatar chat room. I'm glad they let beta testers invite friends so I got a beta from a friend and knew not to go near that POS with a ten foot pole.
"There is no problem in the universe that can't be solved with a bribe, a paid assassin, or an overpowered fighter." - Chubain from Jumpgate Evolution
It would be a disastrous business decision to pull the license like that. Yeah, by pulling the license, they eliminate a competitor.. but they also eliminate any kind of confidence in their brand, which is more important. Other companies and development houses would see PWE as toxic if they did that. If PWE will do that to NC, what would stop them from doing it to anyone else? No, as ruthless as PWE is, they are too smart for that.
NC on the other hand, has shut down at least seven games at varying levels of development and profitability. CoH may have been barely more than a blip on the radar next to NCs big games, but it was still healthy and profitable, especially by western standards.
I think this is NC. They took a huge loss over the last year because of that game that starts with "A", and they may have shut down Paragon in order to use it as a tax writeoff.
Also, many of you may not know this, but CoH was not the only game Paragon had in active development. They had another, unnamed project in development for at least a year, and I seriously doubt that was using the Cryptic engine. There would be no reason to also can that game if CoH was having licensing issues.
So licensing issues are unlikely, and CoH was profitable...
No, this has nothing to do with PWE, and everything to do with NC and its long history of culling games that aren't doing precisely as well as they want, even if they are profitable, and CoH was making around $10 million a year profit.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
I really do.
CoH was my game. The one I've played off and on, but been continuously subscribed to, for the last eight years.
I've stuck with STO, despite PWE's business tactics... but if their fingerprints are on the dk'tagh, I can't. I'm done.
no one is safe in todays economy and any game should shut its doors at anytime for a number of reasons so if you have an MMO or more that you enjoy, dont take it for granted as there is no guarantee it will be around forever.
I think this is a good, old fashioned "going under". It happens when Expenses > Income.
___________________________
In game: Commadore_Bob; Joined Jul 2009; That post count + 20,000
It wasn't all that long ago that IIRC PWE stated that STO was their #1 money-maker (not sure on that, don't quote me). And PWE is, so far as I know, a fairly big company. Plus, they were able to find a buyer for STO in the first place. Add into this the fact that there are a lot of Trek nerds out there, and a lot of them don't have qualms with STO being focused on blowing things up, and the fact that IIRC Star Trek Vegas showed that a lot of people don't even know about STO yet - a lot of potential customers, and you've got a pretty good potential customer base. Furthermore, STO seems to attract a much older age bracket than a lot of MMO's - older people with a few bucks to throw around here and there that high schoolers and starving college students don't necessarily have. This, I imagine, is a relatively untapped market.
It's easy to forget that STO has essentially been being kicked in the face since BEFORE day 1. They had to rush the game out the door after picking up a few scraps of stuff to base a game on from another company. They had serious problems at launch, and things got worse as the cash stream from Atari dried up to a trickle sufficient to keep the lights on and not much else. They had to contend with a very small team throughout much of this. They were sold off and then they spent several months revamping the game's innards for F2P, and the company's innards, after being purchased. This seems to be the first period wherein they've got a fair amount of stability since... well, ever.
There is a concern that PWE's brands supposedly tend to last about 5 years, but Star Trek is an existing "big name" brand, and one that's got movies coming out, at that. Plus this has revitalized the Prime universe - and aside from the books is probably the only source of Prime universe material this side of fanfic that we're going to be getting, possibly from now on. The prospects of an 'alternate' MMO for Star Trek aren't looking too great for a variety of reasons, either, including the current MMO market overall, plus I doubt that a hyper-canon Star Trek iteration would appeal to any sizeable number of MMO-goers (could be wrong though).
I think the largest problems STO faces are 1) content and 2) monetization. I believe that 1) will be solved as best as possible given the relatively small team size, but it's going to take time. 2) we are seeing in things such as the Starbase system. It will be trial and error for some time, although I suspect that it may mean that we see more subscriber perks cropping in, since although subs aren't a gold mine they ARE steady cash, or at least a large one-time infusion of money. The lockboxes are not going away because they will continue to be a consistent hit for cash, and they help to keep the lights on, as much vitriol as comes from them; however, they will also continue to evolve.
Unfortunately, however, this closure is a reminder of the inherent mortality of an MMO. I do believe that this will be the only MMO I will play, as I'd rather not get attached to another one. So it will probably be my first, last and only, although I hope STO goes on for a loooong while.
(Disclaimer - I am NOT an expert at MMOs, once again, for all I know every last word of this is wrong)
As I understand it Lego Universe was an odd duck anyway. I'm pretty sure that expectations and what was delivered were lightyears apart.
From what I recall, Lego Universe was a fairly standard MMO in a lot of ways - and therein lies the problem. If I hear 'Lego MMO' I am going to expect to be able to take a bunch of virtual bricks, slap them together, and drive off in my (probably poorly built) brick-buggy and do... something or other. I would not expect it to be the exact same thing as everything else (in a general sense, e.g. everything is pre-built and you can only "build" things through conventional crafting) except the world is a bunch of lego bricks and my toons are lego people. Note that I am aware of the inherent problems with such as there are all kinds of things one can build with lego bricks that you wouldn't want your 6 year old seeing once, let alone on a daily basis, the wisdom of giving a 6 year old MMO access aside, but the image of being able to use legos in a Lego MMO is still something I would expect.
This is made worse when one accounts that at least some of this is entirely possible to do, even without the resources of a major company, particularly if you have smaller servers springing up that are administered by smaller groups. Examples include Roblox and Minecraft (sort of). Building with virtual Legos itself without the online component is hardly new - although not fancy, fans have been working on that since the 1990s!
So long story short, according to everything I know about Lego Universe, it was such an odd case all that it really says, at least to ME, is "don't deliver on something that is almost completely different from what your fans expect." I don't think STO qualifies.
Edit: Fixed grammar/wording that was done at a bad time.
That's not to say that STO isn't doing financially well - for example, we know their staff has more then doubled since PWE took over - but doing well isn't the same thing as being a "#1 money-maker."
Except expenses weren't greater than income. I already said that. CoH was healthy. They were pulling in millions per year profit. That said, it was barely a blip on the radar next to Lineage, and that game that starts with "A"? It lost about 10 times more subs than CoH even HAS. CoH, while profitable and healthy, was a rounding error over at NC.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪