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Why NCSoft Bought CoX
Melieza
Member Posts: 269
After hearing the news of CO offering a F2P version a couple weeks ago, I was talking to my coworker and wondered why CoX hadnt done the same. He told me something I had never thought about, and it seems true. Here is what he told me.
NCSoft didn't purchase CoX to make a profit. The game was already 3-4? years old when NCSoft bought it and bigger and better superhero games were already in the making. So why did they want it?
For the coding.
CoX had flight. NCSoft wanted code they could break down and use for flight without having to create it from scratch. Why did they want flight code?
Aion of course.
And sure enough, a few years later, Aion was released with this "innovative" flight system. But it wasn't innovative at all, they just took it from CoX, literally.
Aion has made NCSoft incredible amounts of money, even with the lackluster response from NA. Money worth spent on CoX? I'd say so.
So in the end, NCSoft got what they wanted from CoX. They aren't looking to make a huge profit off of it. They will host it and try and keep its players happy, but turning it into a F2P is probably more effort than they care to give.
What do you think?
Comments
I'm not familiar with coding and stuff like that but this does sound ridiculous. Is it so hard to code flying in a game? Really? It would be more believable if NCsoft did it to get the codes for nuclear weapons.
Didn't NCsoft bought the right to do CoX 2 recently, I saw something like it on MMORPG.com
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For a MMO? HELL YES!
X and Y with a limited Z axis in tracking players all on the same sever at one time is big deal. Some other games with flight still doesn't have it as fluid as City of Heroes got it.
But over all old news is old.
Out of all of Cryptic's games CoX's is the most polished and is used to base a lot future code from.
I think it's a fairly silly premise given that NCsoft licensed Far Cry's engine from Crytek—specifically for Aion—which natively supports flight.
Honestly, I think NCsoft bought CoX simply because it was one of their few titles (other than Guild Wars) that had proven successful with a North American audience.
Didn't knew that. Still isn't Ncsoft big enough, with so much experience behind it's back to not have these problems? Now that I think about it, NCsoft's past game didn't even had jump (L2, GW). Although GW wasn't developed from them.
Well NCSoft had a lot to do with the development of CoH.
Why not use it?
I mean AION wasn't my cup ot tea, but when I played it I could feel a few different ideas used from previous titles of theirs. It makes sense to me.
edit: apparently none of the UBB or HTML code works here...
Lot of speculation with little base. While the concept of flight might be borrowed, there's very little to indicate that coding could be transferred.
Aion runs on a licensed Crytek's original CryEngine.
(http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=57)
City of Heroes runs on the original Cryptic's in house game engine, no details are available but in the credits it does not list any licensed technology.
While the fine details of the purchase are unknown, it is known that NCSoft seems to have a perpetual license to use the engine technologies developed for City of Heroes. The license does not extend to the code fork and API swap that produced the Champions Online engine.
(http://us.ncsoft.com/en/news/press-releases/ncsoft-announce-23.html)
The main reason that most people agree upon that NC bought CoH is to have a stable income base in the Western MMORPG market, which NC previously did not really have. Guild Wars income peaks and drops depending on when expansions are released, and NC's big hitters, Lineage 1/2 and now Aion do not have a large playerbase in the West (at least compared to Asia). Notice in the Q4 2007 Report, right after the CoH acquisition, Lineage 2 had on average 79,986 users monthly accessing its servers in the US and Europe combined. Compare this to say Korea (445,096) or even Taiwan (116,080). City of Heroes in Q4 2007 had 136,250 monthly accesses. This number, while not super high, remained and remains a fairly consistent number over the years.
(http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx?BID=&BC=&BNo=&SYear=&SType=&SWord=&PNo=2)
For many years City of Heroes was the only superhero MMO on the market, perhaps NC saw a profit to be made from this acquisition in the Western markets where NC does not have as strong of a presence. The rather lackluster launch of Champions Online now sees it moving to a F2P model in a move to appeal to new customers, so it will remain to be seen how NC views CoH and its relationship to the competition, including the upcoming DCUO.
Remember, it has to be fun to be a game. Grinding is a bedroom activity, and the point is definitely not to do my wife as fast as possible.
Actually, not to toot my own horn, or in other words, precisely to toot my own horn... that was one of the first things I thought of when I heard about Aion.
In terms of character physics, CoX's engine works amazingly well, and very fluid. Particularly the travel powers.
Why is it so hard for people to realize cox is doing well always has been and does not need a f2p model, f2p models are always bad and I do not know why you would even bother with a f2p model of this game, you have to pay for good games regardless, and if you want to play this game I doubt there going to make it easy for you to play for free at all.
Eq1 still isnt free, there are other mmos that are not free and even if they are there is always a catch, lotro isnt all that appealing to the masses either there is a reason why they made a f2p model while its better then others you will still run into a wall.
Who the hek cares about f2p models its terrible, only good if the game needs to attract more people. It is only 15 a month for crying out loud like mmorpgs have almost always been.