A Convenient Lie

While I pat the members of the Save City of Heroes campaign on the collective backs for fighting the good fight, I do find that the truth has been a bit of a casualty among them. I refer to the campaign's meme that City of Heroes was profitable at the time of its closure.

Press for sources and hard numbers, any such claimants come up empty. They incorrectly point to the quarterly financial reports as showing profit (they show total sales, not profit), and make general references to "developer comments" (the same developers were caught by surprise at the game's closing, so couldn't have been paying much attention to the obviously troubling financial numbers post Freedom).

It's understandable that they need a narrative of why. Why is the game worth saving? It's also a narrative that needs to deal with how. How is anyone going to be convinced to invest in the game unless the game is profitable?

Under this kind of emotional pressure, simply accepting a convenient lie is very tempting. Especially one that could be true. After all, we don't know what the quarterly expenses of the game were, so we have no idea if the game was profitable or not.

Even if City of Heroes had a modest profit, that profit would almost certainly be consumed by the unannounced project the studio was working on. So even if City of Heroes was profitable (unlikely but possible) Paragon Studios itself almost certainly wasn't. The closure strongly suggests a loss, not a profit (think about it: grocery stores consider themselves to be doing well on a 1-2% profit!).

If City of Heroes is to be saved it should be saved on the facts and truth of the matter. It should be saved on its own, valid merits. Not on fictions.

P.S. I am perfectly willing to admit I'm wrong on this one if anyone can provide a valid accounting of the game's quarterly expenses. Highly unlikely any such evidence exists, but I'm always open to accepting the facts.

UPDATE: MMORPG.com has posted an article attempting to answer the question of the game's profitability. They quote two sources: an anonymous source who says the annual operating costs of the game/studio was $4 million (returning $12 million dollars a year on that investment), and NCsoft which said the anonymous source is "simply wrong" and that "The studio was unprofitable before the shutdown."

So on one hand we have an anonymous source saying the studio was profitable, on the other we have the studio's publisher NCsoft going on record saying the studio was not profitable. NCsoft seems more credible to me. Closing a studio down because it isn't profitable fits the available facts, where closing down a studio "because we're evil and or incompetent don't you know" even though it's making a 200% profit (combined with the very questionable $4 million dollar annual operating cost the anonymous source gave) doesn't.

In my opinion, and the opinion of City of Heroes' former publisher, the assertion that the game/studio was profitable is not supported by the available facts.