What motivates the powers that be at NCSoft is hard to discern. I think the fearsome negative reaction by the CoH fan base caught them by surprise. It dwarfed the sort of reactions they had experienced when they closed down some of their other games. However, if you've monitored other boards and news sites on the net that deal with mmorpgs you've undoubtedly noticed there was a negative reaction among gaming fans of all stripes.
From the various postings on glassdoor regarding working for NCsoft, the company appears to be fixated on a "We're a Korean company, run according to Korean business practices, and all of our subsidiaries will be, too, regardless of where they're based" management style. Firing people out of the blue on a Friday, for example, is considered courteous to the employee, in that they don't have to come into work with the spectre of failure hanging over their head, and have the weekend to compose themselves. And Korean culture has always had a very strong habit of deference to the people above you in the power structure, and deference from the people below you in the power structure; when your superiors make a decision, it is your duty to accept it and work within the parameters of that decision. Had NCsoft shut down one of their Korean MMOs, the playerbase would have mostly taken it quietly, as befits their position in the player-vs-developer power structure. But CoH wasn't a Korean MMO, as its abortive deployment there proved; it was a Western MMO, with Western players, for whom having management sweep in with what looks like an offhand decision with no explanation is not only outrageous behavior but insulting -- "we're closing the game; suck it up."
When we protested the decision, the NCsoft management actually unbent to the degree of releasing the statement that CoH didn't fit with their future plans for the company -- an unusually considerate move by their view, giving a reason that the game was being shuttered, but again being blind to the fact that they
weren't addressing a Korean audience. The essentially content-free 'explanation' for the shutdown just fanned resentment among the playerbase, reinforcing the perception of NCsoft as being unjustifiably high-handed about the action.
I think that the fundamental problem is that NCsoft is, at its core, a Korean company, and as such only pays such lip service to the practices of other cultures as they're forced into, and as long as they're in the power position they don't
care that other cultures aren't going to react the same way Koreans do. Given some of the things I've read about Korean business practices, I wonder how much of the shutdown was CoH underperforming and how much was Paragon Studios taking the wrong approach to trying to buy themselves away from NCsoft and the NCsoft management finally getting tired of the Paragon Studios negotiators not being able to recognize that they'd been told 'no' in a way that any
Korean negotiator would have recognized, but kept coming back again and again trying to work out a deal that was never going to happen, until NCsoft ordered the studio shut down because the PS management didn't know their place.
And, yes, that's a very prejudiced opinion of NCsoft management, but what I've seen about the way they conduct business suggests that they try to force everything they do into their own cultural mode. City of Heroes didn't
play like a Korean-style MMO; it encouraged individuality and personal achievement, rather than having working together as part of a group being the core mode of gameplay, it didn't have the sort of recordkeeping that could be used to drive leaderboards (look at how long before the shutdown the City Information Terminals stopped giving stats on victories in the various zones), it didn't have the potential for endless microtransactions to sell cosmetic gear on a character-by-character basis, the endgame didn't consist of nothing but PvP, with better PvP gear being available for
more microtransactions... It was essentially the opposite of most of the fundamental design considerations of a Korean MMO, and as such NCsoft didn't really understand what made CoH what it was. And because of that, they were blindsided when they ordered the shutdown and the playerbase turned on them.
