There's No 'Right Way' to Kill A Game

This story is making the rounds of the exile community, wherein a Microsoft executive says nice things about CoH:

"There's not a week that goes by I don't miss City of Heroes," Microsoft's Kevin Perry told GamesIndustry International at the Game Developers Conference last month. "It felt like an untimely death of a friend, a 'taken from us so soon' sort of thing."

Unfortunately, he followed that laudable sentiment with this laughable one, emphasis mine:

While Perry said that NCsoft handled the City of Heroes shutdown just fine, he added that the increasing popularity of the games-as-a-service approach is setting developers up for a litany of headaches on legal, technical, game design, and community management fronts when it eventually comes time to pull the plug on these games.

Which is just an industry insider not dissing other insiders- after all, one never knows on who's desk a future resume might land. Everyone who isn't a prospective employee realizes NC bungled the shutdown of CoH as badly as they could have short of tripping over the server cord during weekly maintenance & not bothering to plug it back in. And this points to a fundamental imbalance between game publishers and game players- at a certain point, the interests of the factions cease to align, and once that happens players have zero recourse.

A game that's Hot! and New! is one thing, a game that's showing its age is another, and a game that's positively geriatric by the 'Dog Years' standards of digital media is something else entirely.  Gamers are citizens of their online worlds and have a citizen's patriotic attachment, while the affection of publishers is a direct result of profitability.

As illustrated by another quote on efforts to preserve older IP:

"It's a hard business case to make," Perry admits. "There's not a business there. So it's the sort of thing where a museum may be the right pathway, or an educational institution might be the right pathway to do so. It's getting better, but it's not where it needs to be."

So when it's making lots of money, things are terrific, but the moment it stops then it's suddenly the responsibility of a museum or a school to take care of.

And as we've seen the first impulse of many companies deciding the fate of a title that's gotten gray around the muzzle is more

Well Jimmy, Spot can't get around like he used to so looks like we have to put him down

than

Thanks for the years of service, Spot, now Jimmy's going to take you home to live with him.  


The #SaveCoH coalition may not have saved our game or has any visible influence on NCSoft, but the echoes of its sustained, vocal fury are heard in his comments about "managing legacy IP" and how a bungled shutdown can "damage your brand".  If our vocal stand against publisher injustice helps future communities lobby for and preserve their games, it was a fight worth losing.

The whole post is a brief education in corporate priorities.

He misses CoH, yet NCSoft did nothing wrong.  He's very concerned that mishandling a closure can 'damage the brand', not the fact that closing down a shared online world renders entire communities homeless.  Giving players plenty of advance warning and allowing them to 'grieve in public' is as far as he's willing to go.

In short, killing a game is just a PR problem which you can get around with nimble footwork.

To that I say nonsense.

There is no "right" way to kill a game, any more than there's a "right" way to demolish an inhabited town.
When NCSoft issued CoH's death note the population was around fifty thousand-ish, which is roughly equivalent to the population of the town where I live. If anyone had plans to raze that community because we weren't profitable enough, there would be hell to pay.  But destroy a virtual community of the same size and it's just a PR problem.

The only 'right' here is having a system in place to bestow stewardship of the game world upon the players, to run as they will in a non-profit setting.  I'm sure this idea seems ridiculous to some suit in an office who views gamers as livestock to be milked until they become inconvenient, then shipped to the slaughterhouse, but it is the only morally correct way to handle the shutdown of any long-running MMO.

My last post lauded Turbine for their enlightened handling of the Asheron's Call sunset.
But such respectful handling ought not be left to the judgement of individual companies, but written into the EULA, a document which has heretofore only been used to bash players over the head.

Until such player protections are codified in a binding agreement, I'm done with traditional MMOs.