The sad news of the closing of City of Heroes came down just over a month ago. Since the announcement on August 31 the CoH community has been nothing but creative. They’ve held in-game protests, created a dedicated website, devised homemade viral videos, started petitions, supported the soon-to-be-unemployed developers and even got a little jerky. All in the name of saving the game they love. It’s been nothing short of inspirational.
Sadly, NCSoft doesn’t care.
The company finally responded to all of the press and calls for saving yesterday, and it wasn’t anything short of soul crushing. NCSoft responded with a short let down:
We appreciate the overwhelmingly constructive and positive messages in the emails, notes, and packages you’ve sent in support of the game. It has not been an easy decision for us to close Paragon Studios and prepare to shut down City of Heroes. We’ve exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful.
It appears that the only positive thing CoH players have left to look forward to are the upcoming closing events. City of Heroes will wrap up more than eight years of service on November 30, 2012.
We’re not done pressuring NCSoft.
Definitely don’t buy their “exhausted all options” statement. All that means is they haven’t really tried.
Really, this is a company that decided to shut down a profitable game abruptly and didn’t explore any options to try and sell it before doing so.
What it ACTUALLY means is they haven’t been able to get the amount of money out of it they want for it. Not that they haven’t tried. They are Korean the country that practically invented grind gold farming and RMT. All they want is more money and to hell with the players and social base.