The MMO market has been more or less tanking left, right, and center all at once. With The Secret World’s disappointing launch, Star Wars: The Old Republic losing more than half its subscribers, and World of Warcraft continuing a slow decline, along with slow presales for Mists of Pandaria, it’s been a question of “who’s next” for months.
Now we know. Without any warning, City of Heroes has announced the immediate sunsetting of the longest running superhero MMO. Effective immediately, you can no longer buy anything from the Paragon Market, and all recurring subscriptions have been cancelled. The game servers will be shut down in the coming weeks in a schedule that makes this look like it may be one of the fastest shutdowns of an MMO ever.
It’s no surprise City of Heroes is shutting down, to those of us who date to release. We watched the game careen from high to low constantly, along with the loss of many key developers—some under questionable circumstances. Subscribers have been stabilized around a small core of what could only be described as hardcore players who refused to give up. Concurrent player estimates put the total number of players online at any given time across all servers at under 10,000 before a clumsy Free To Play conversion last year.
A personal experience
I played City of Heroes from release of the original, so I got to see the decline firsthand. It’s not at all surprising to me that the Free To Play model didn’t help—it was poorly planned, and the engine is just plain dated. The “Dark Mirror” update was supposed to bring the 2004-era engine and graphics up to more modern standards, but it didn’t really do much in that department other than increase the minimum requirements. The game needed a major overhaul from top to bottom to stand any chance of attracting new subscribers, NCsoft wasn’t willing to put in the investment to do that, and Paragon didn’t have enough resources to be able to do it.
Paragon Studios, the wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft formed to hold the City of Heroes assets and continue development after the less-than-amicable split with Cryptic Studios (the brainchild of Jack “Statesman” Emmert) will also be shutting down on an extremely accelerated schedule. Most employees responsible for development and maintenance have already been given notice, and only a skeleton crew will remain to perform the shutdown.
“Thank you. Thank you for your years of support. You’ve been with us every step of the way, sharing in our challenges, encouraging us to make City of Heroes better, more than everyone else thought it could be.” – Andy Belford, Community Manager, Paragon Studios.
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