For anyone who follows gaming or the industry, and didn't already know - after eight years, City of Heroes (abbrev. CoH), an MMO game which I enjoyed for several faithful years, is closing its doors on Nov. 30.
The publisher and parent company, NCSoft (which recently released Guild Wars 2), is terminating 80 employees at the subsidiary company, Paragon Studios, which formed to take over development and maintenance duties after the original developer, Cryptic Studios (Star Trek Online) parted ways with NCSoft several years ago.
CoH had recently (within the last year or so) gone to an F2P model, but their subscriber base dwindled over time, as did revenues, which can be seen from the NCSoft quarterly revenue sheets for their North American market.
Personally, I think it was a fun game, it certainly had a few innovative concepts at release and over its life, definitely a must-have (or at least a must-try) for any fan of the superheroic genre. But after you played through the number of alts on whom you wanted to try different powersets, the game got stale pretty quick -- few if any changes to maps, enemies, and combat mechanics did not help keep the game fresh. Much of the new content was story-based, so a disinterest in story would likely mean you got bored that much more quickly.
Also, they aggravated portions of their subscribers repeatedly - first hardcore players that resented the implementation of Enhancement Diversification, which weakened powers in order to make way for the invention system, and later also with restrictions imposed on PvP (travel power supression, etc.).
Unrelated to their closing, I just wonder how much longer the MMO model generally, to say nothing of particular strategies like F2P, will persist. Will future generations of gamers even want to play MMOs as we knew MMOs? Or will they prefer instead to play games on their mobile devices/share experiences on social media?
Original EQ is still around, and it's 13 years old, right?