It's tough, because Asheron's Call 2 is their own game, and they self-publish all their games. They aren't very big to begin with, and they have never paid another studio to do anything for them. So I kinda think they're out.
I sent my letters to Disney, but frankly I'm not holding my breath on that one either, nice though it would be. This endeavor was not by invitation-- it was a shot in the dark lobbed at an unsuspecting target, who may well consider us harassers by this point. Let's face it, they are openly making moves to break into the Asian market with their brand-new gaming franchises, and here we are with our 8 1/2 year old game having just been shut down by a very large, if not the largest, Asian MMORPG publisher. (Of course, we had no idea about the direction Disney was taking with their online gaming when Team Wildcard made their pitch, but still.) And CoH (though I love it as much as anyone) bombed in Asia besides. I'm not getting my hopes up too far on this one.
I still think Valve would be a better option (they make money off one-shot sales-- even their online shooter facets are F2P so CoH's monthly fees may well interest them, and as they don't run massively multiplayer games, it may be more worth it to them to rehire as much of PS as they can to develop and run CoH). But the best option of all would be for Brian Clayton to re-forge his financial alliances and make another offer for CoH similarly to what he tried to do this past September. In reality, no one else is going to care even remotely as much about CoH as he and PS do.
But who knows, what with this crazy new "wholly-owned subsidiary" thing going down on December 24th, NCSoft may not even want to think about CoH or risk dredging it up for a sale so that it entangles these other proceedings of theirs. I more than suspect that this whole big deal thing is why CoH was shut down in such a knee-jerk fashion to begin with-- in preparation for this new total transfer of stock.
I just wish we knew whether having Brian go in to rescue CoH BEFORE this new subsidiary steps in (isn't that what Fansy was mumbo-jumboing about, that all ties would be severed right when CoH closed? Well, it's been closed for 2 weeks now! What are we waiting for?) would be better than trying to wait until after the new layer of trouble and control takes over....