Terwyn

I'm also extremely familiar with accounting slight of hand, and am not fully convinced that it is not in play here.

That's interesting, considering that there are a games that have launched as F2P and have done extremely well with it -League of Legends, for example.

Widely accepted knowledge may well be incorrect, after all.

You'll forgive my skepticism that what you are saying regarding Paragon Studios is in fact true, as if they were not being profitable, I suspect we would certainly have seen evidence of that before August 31st.

Edison's famous invention, the lightbulb?

He bought one of the key patents behind it off two guys in Toronto.

My position is that the game was healthy because it was quite probably profitable. Now, some might call it unhealthy because it wasn't profitable *enough,* but that's splitting hairs. There are plenty of possible reasons why the game had diminishing revenue, one of the big ones would be the wholesale financial crisis of the past few years, as that has had an effect on everyone.

One's best sales are always from repeat customers, that much is true. That fact lead to the development of a multi-billion dollar CRM industry, after all. I perceive the problem faced by Paragon as being three fold:

1) Sudden drop in the availability of disposable income to throw towards frivolous expenses, of which gaming would be one.

2) Minimal involvement from the parent company (NCSoft) in regards to advertising and marketing support.

3) The game's actual age. People's attention spans are a lot shorter than they used to be, so we largely all prefer the newer, shinier stuff.

At this point, the best way to save City of Heroes, should someone obtain the entire IP, is start on CoH2 immediately.

We also have a game that had a non-existent advertising budget. That alone proves fatal for many ventures.

The same financial reports, which to me suggest a different story.

What grounds do you have to believe that City of Heroes was an unhealthy game?

I'm sure you're aware that I was being facetious.

Technically, one does not need to steal to be a thief, one need only take what does not belong to one's self. Largely, what I take I return to its rightful owner.

That is indeed a very real possibility.

Thief yes, racist no. Discriminating against people on the basis of their ethnicity is bad for business no matter how you look at it.

Because I would rather be executed than own an Apple product?

I don't own an iPod.

I get it, you believe I'm a racist, and no amount of evidence is ever going to be enough to convince you otherwise.

We may well actually be telling the truth, did that ever occur to you?

The Studio Manager, the guy in charge of everything Paragon, had no idea what the real numbers were?

Think it was more likely Brian Clayton who handed them to her, myself.

I don't know, but probably enough to finance the development of a second game under an entirely different IP.

If so, please share if possible.

That isn't saying it's not worth speculating on, it's saying that conclusions shouldn't be made until more information is available from the involved parties in question.

It may well be a true price, it may well be fraudulent.

I simply believe that the legalities of such negotiations force things to remain anonymous. I would happily confirm whether the $80 million tag is real, should I find the means to do so. As it stands, if it is the number that came from NCSoft, rather than external speculation, then the supposition that its goal is to make the appearance of being willing to sell without ever actually holding the intent to sell is quite a reasonable conclusion to make.

Personally, I'm waiting for more information.

Did it occur to you that the number is accurate, and the parties that made the offer are legally required to remain anonymous?

Well, if you tend to presume that the universe we inhabit is all that reality was, is, and ever could be, that would necessarily be true.

But if this universe and reality are two different things, it would be quite possible for this universe to have been programmed or initiated by an external entity.

Actually, religion can be quite easily demonstrated to be an emergent property of human neurology and cognition. About the only thing we can accurately say about God is that, if real, God is simply the engineer, architect, and programmer of reality.

Everything else is just procedural generation.