NCSoft Closes "City of Heroes" Publisher Paragon Studios

samazon writes "Earlier today, City of Heroes community manager Andy Belford announced that NCSoft is shutting down Paragon Studios. Over 7,500 individuals were viewing the official CoH forums as of 3:00 PM EST, and this thread from Belford, AKA Zwilinger, notes that 'In a realignment of company focus and publishing support, NCsoft has made the decision to close Paragon Studios. Effective immediately, all development on City of Heroes will cease and we will begin preparations to sunset the world's first, and best, Super Hero MMORPG before the end of the year.' A petition has already been created to save City of Heroes."

Being "Super"

[Anonymous Coward]

There will never be a game like City of Heroes that allowed you such a level of creativity in bringing the inner superhero to life. I played for 8 years. It will be missed.

Re:awww damn

[Sir_Sri]

It hung around this long, that says a lot. 2004 -2012 is a very very successful game.

You can't expect a product to survive indefinitely if it can't attract enough customers to replace the ones who gradually attrition away. Even WoW is losing subscribers. The MMO landscape is changing a lot, the economy is bad, peoples tastes change, etc. It's possible the market has shifted and there won't even be another world of warcraft to follow, it will just be a series of smaller more casual niche games that are all free to play and only last a couple of years.

Re:Being "Super"

[iamhassi]

agreed. And this is why I've never played a mmorpg more than a few hours. I'm scared to death I'm going to invest some real time in it and then have someone kill it someday and watch everything I enjoyed die in front of me. That's scary, watching a life I created and nurtured be killed with nothing to show for it.

Re:Being "Super"

[Hatta]

We are missing a great many early films from the cultural record because they were simply thrown away. It seems the same thing is happening with MMORPGs. Unfortunately, preserving a social interactive work is much harder than film. History will likely be blind to many major works of this still early age of video gaming.

Re:Being "Super"

[Teancum]

I would hate to think of all of the MUDs that have disappeared over the years... many of which also had tremendous communities and some impressive accomplishments.

Still, I'd have to agree with your sentiment here. My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.

There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?