Brillig

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mercedes+lackey

As far as I know, no one (who's speaking, at least) knows the staff breakdown between ongoing CoH development and secret project.

Which is why many believe that CoH may have been profitable while Paragon Studios was not.

It's usually not a clear-cut as that. Even if you lay off the secret project team, you lose a lot. You lose efficiency and institutional knowledge - if secret project has too many artists for the next month, they can work on CoH stuff. If someone working on CoH has a weird bug, they can walk over the the secret project developer who originally wrote the code. You probably only needed one office manager for both groups. After killing the secret project, you still need that person, etc, etc...

And finally, I think it's quite possible that from NCSoft's perspective, they funded Paragon to develop new games. The fact that they had an existing product that brought in cash was just gravy. (Seriously, CoH was a tiny part of their revenue. Gravy might be overstating the case.)

Or, perhaps, NCSoft decided that the market for the secret project didn't look promising and decided to refocus their efforts on their core markets?

Again, I'm not aware of any authoritative answer as to what it was, but this is what came out of the rumor mill: http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2012/...v-2-0-because/

That last part is where you go off the rails. You can't extrapolate from the results of a poll like this and draw any meaningful conclusions, but you're trying to lean hard in that direction.

Here's an equally (in)valid formulation. There are 495 members on the forum right now. Only 79 people have voted so far. Therefore, 84% of the players aren't willing to pay any amount of money for a continuation of CoH.

On a separate note, the numbers presented are too big and too small. They're too big because they're significantly out of line for what people have charged for LTS in the past. And they're too small because you'll never get the dollar total up to an interesting figure. Recapitalizing Paragon is going to take on the (very rough) order of $10M. You're just shy of 2%.

Honestly, I think a more interesting question is how many people would be willing to put up $10,000 or more in exchange for voting stock in a new Paragon Studios? You might actually get the couple of hundred people it would take to make that an interesting number...

You have to consider that the original Guild Wars sold 6 million copies (give or take). 2 million could actually be regarded as a slightly disappointing number. (I'm aware it took many years for GW to sell that many copies. Investor expectations are not rational.)

I can guarantee you that the "bad press they've been getting from Paragon Studios' closing" has had zero impact on the stock price.

True, but potentially irrelevant. My read is that NCSoft didn't regard just killing the new project (and leaving CoH running) as a possibility. After all, they'd been down that road before. Even though a significant portion of the costs of Paragon were development of the new project, NCSoft shut the entire business unit down.

This is what I've been getting at. I think all the talk about "realignment of company focus and publishing support" has nothing to do with CoH, but with killing the new project. There was no way that big profits were going to come from CoH anyway, the big deal would always have been a new game - that was where NCSoft was going to see a big reward if Paragon were successful.

CoH is collateral damage.

I would agree that this is a more plausible figure, but you have to remember that the operating costs for Paragon Studios don't include the servers and support staff necessary to run the game.

If Paragon were running a profit of ~$800k/quarter exclusive of non-Paragon Studios costs, that's not a number that is of much use going forward. If anyone were to take over the game, they would still need to take on those additional costs.

Not sure exactly where you're going awry. I assume you've set up your account, input your serial code, and you're downloading from "https://account.guildwars2.com/download"? Have you tried saving the download and running the gw2setup.exe out of the download folder?

Because they believe they can reduce costs?

See above.

Because they were as dumb as the proverbial posts? Reportedly, they were on their third 'new game development' after having the first two cancelled. That's pretty big writing on the wall.

I don't "think" I know better. An SEC filing is authoritative. Go look that up.

You can claim whatever you want that makes ML an "authority," but when she is wrong on the facts, she is wrong. I'm not dumb enough to accept everything based on what a "respected" person says, but go ahead and enjoy your certainty.

Absent other information, I've assumed that "Larry" is Larry Dixon, her husband, illustrator and sometime co-author. Not aware that he has any financial background.

Point out one thing in that post which was unreasonable. Otherwise, take your own advice with a warm glass of STFU.

The $10m number comes from SEC filings. It's not my word. At this point, it's the word of NCSoft's accountants.

When Melissa Bianco posts audited financials for Paragon Studios, then you'll have data of equivalent weight to argue from. Until then, you're just parroting third-party hearsay.

Your source has no clue what she is talking about. The $10m annual revenue figure is from quarterly statements filed with the SEC. They are about as authoritative as it gets unless you are able to personally audit NCSoft's books.

That's $800k/month revenue, not profit. Clearly, she heard one thing and remembered another.

An 80-person tech company in Silicon Valley is not cheap to run. I don't know what their salary structure is like, but an educated guess (I have been working in tech companies in SV about that size for the past 15 years) would be that running Paragon was costing between $6-$8m annually.

And that's just the cost for dev. There's also support costs and server costs. Way back in the infancy of MMO's, Raph Koster said that costs for dev, support and infrastructure were roughly equal. Now things have changed a lot since then, servers and bandwidth are a lot cheaper. Support has stayed about the same.

It's certainly well within the possibilities that overall, the business of Paragon Studios and CoH was losing money.

How is it possible for some people to say that the game was doing well? It's actually very easy to do if you just pick the right numbers. For one thing, not everyone at Paragon was working on CoH. If you assume (number picked at random) half the people were, then you could say that CoH was making $10m in revenue at a cost of $3-4m. That looks very nice from that perspective.

On the other hand, you could say that Paragon was pulling in $10m in revenue against costs of $10-12m ($6-8m Paragon studios, $2.5m support, $1.5m infrastructure).

Unfortunately, it's likely that NCSoft was looking at the total costs, and it didn't look that great. When you add in the fact that Paragon was apparently on their third 'seekrit project,' and NCSoft still wasn't enthused about it...

tl;dr - My read on the situation is that this closure has at least as much to do with NCSoft pulling out of the 'seekrit project 3.0' as it does about CoH. I think from NCSoft's point of view, CoH was a side-business that helped defray the costs of operating Paragon as a development studio for new games, and when they decided to stop that development, it made no sense to continue the side-business.

No one is saying you can't say what you want. They're just saying it's not constructive. They're saying that you're running the risk of messing up the deals people are trying to get done to save the game.

Now I realize that this is pretty abstract. Here's a more concrete example. Because of the attempt to boycott ArenaNet, I went from "maybe I'll pick up GW2 in a couple of months" to spending $260 on it in the past week. Because of the irrational hate poisining the community, I went from being willing to monetarily support an attempt to retain the game to having no interest in doing so whatsoever.

You're probably thinking that no one will miss my money. You're probably right, although I did spend over two grand on Kickstarters last month. I'm just one person, so even that isn't a big deal. Piss off enough people like me and that's the ballgame.

Actually, for the money it would take, you could fund 3 Paragon studios for a hundred years.

And if keeping you in their good graces cost $100.00?

How much would they have in their coffers then?

You might also want to consider that it may read differently in Korean. It's pretty clearly a translation, and not a great one at that.

No kidding. After all, it would be more in the spirit of their stated goals to provide all their products for free. Or better yet, packaged with hundred dollar bills.

Taking those statements literally is assinine.