Long Live City of Heroes!

I am honestly glad to hear this.

I just don’t believe in paying monthly to play a video game (hence I have never gotten into any MMOs). I don’t care what game it is, I just can’t/won’t do it.

If they do a Marvel MMO that doesn’t have a subscription fee, then you can count me in.

Until then, no thanks.

…So in the end, everyone who got sued over the “Downloadable Skins” debacle can now laugh their asses off at Marvel for having flopped miserably. Serves’em right!

Sam, every MMO that has a subscription fee also gives you the first month free. If you’re like most game players, you play your games the most right after you buy them. Thus, even if you hate subscription fees, you can buy an MMO and play it more in that free month than you will ever play any of your single player games.

Aw, now the thousands of kids who were so wanting to make an ‘official’ Wolverine clone character are going to be so sad…

LOL@Marvel

Hey Sam - 9 million WoW players can’t be wrong. Marvel like any other business out there wants a piece of that pie.

I’ll bet this got canned because they couldn’t find a way to make an MMO work in anyway appealing to a market segment without letting them play the actual Marvel characters. There’s no way they will let the general public play Wolverine or Spider-Man in a public game world like that. Can you imagine some lame 13yr old coming up to everyone as Spidey saying they suxors and how l33t he is? So the only thing they can do is make another COH which is already out so why bother. This game will never happen no matter who makes it.

This is sad. I was excited for the concept of an interactive Marvel Universe where our own characters could take part in big storylines from the books and meet “stars” like the X-Men and Avengers and Spider-Man.

Maybe this company just isn’t the right one for Marvel to be partnered with. If I were Marvel, I’d consider partnering with CoH, and making a subsetting with them.

kitty_tc, Marvel actually *was* partnered with the crew behind City of Heroes on this… Cryptic Studios was developing the game, the same house that brought CoX.

-J

As to how to make a Marvel MMO work as a MMO and still incorporate Hulk/Spidey etc.: You either have them as the NPCs, which would suck… OR let you play as them in certain missions - ie. solo misson where you play as Spidey, a four-man raid where you become the Fantastic Four, a larger raid where you are play as a big group of Avengers/X-Men etc.

Zach,

I also thought it was interesting how they mentioned that there was only one commercial success subscriptioned-based MMORPG. Assuming they’re talking WoW (big assumption, but it is the biggest), I wonder if they were seeing numbers from Cryptic indicating CoH as not being able to sustain itself indefinitely. CoH *was* just sold to another company, which seems to be in “major improvement mode” to improve the game this spring. Wonder if Marvel knows something the CoH public doesn’t?

The kiddies can still look forward to the DCU MMORPG being released this year! Go DC Comics!!

if it was done in the vein of Ultimate Alliance, I would have bought into it. Most MMO’s are getting to be like the online first person shooter deathmaches of the 90’s and get stale really quickly since people cheat with software hacks.

What a lie.

That is, the claim that “…and if you really look at the data there’s basically one (subscription-based MMO) that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success.”

What are the factors affecting valuation? Well, the quality of gameplay is #1. Promising properties who attempted videogame extensions like “ET”, “Total Recall” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” had abysmal gameplay and dragged down those franchises’ ability to command higher licensing fees.

The other factors are sentiment (i.e., how much do we care about our “X-Men” or “Peter Parker”) and closely related, how many people can interact with the platform?

Well, let’s you look at Club Penguin — a kids MMO with NO recognizable ancillary properties — it sold for $350 million (or $700 million if they make certain targets). In comparison, a tiny games company called EA - maybe you’ve heard of it - made $218 million in revenues in 3Q07, or about 50% of its total sales — from Xbox sales.

Meanwhile, other entertainment franchises like “Star Wars” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” have released their own MMOs, and have discovered a mother lode of new users that go beyond their traditional fan bases.

I know, I know…it’s not apples and oranges, but those numbers clearly demonstrate that (1) MMOs are going up in value, especially when you see how frequently they’re being used; (2) WoW, CoH and XBox are all spectacular franchises to the point of being money machines; and (3) if you look at all of the vitriol leveled at EiC Joey Q over Peter Parker’s deal with the devil, it’s a great proxy for measuring sentiment (a fancy way for saying Marvel Zombies are fanatical).

If you accept my premises, there’s a few ways of interpreting the cancellation announcement:

(1) The gameplay sucked and Marvel didn’t want their name associated with the product.

(2) Marvel got a bigger and better offer from someone else.

(3) Steve Wacker came over from DC and told them just how frickin’ hard it is to do a MMO right (Jim Lee’s been working on the bible, they’ve been improving their ability to deliver a real-time product, etc.) and it scared the bejeezus out of Marvel.

(4) The success of Webkinz, Club Penguin etc. have beguiled Marvel away from a WoW-centric shoot-em-up (which, by the way, is SUPER expensive to maintain when you consider how much R&D is spent against the Madden franchise to keep that property fresh) and more towards a UGC (user-generated content) model that makes it easier to synchronize activities that take place online with events that are published in real-time in the Marvel Universe proper.

All of this is speculation of course, but if you read the tea leaves it leaves DC, along with Sony Online, in an interesting position.

As long as there is city of Heroes, this is no great loss. I double dog dare anyone to do a superhero baed MMO better than COH.

I figure Marvel heard about all the in game weddings in other MMOs (like EQ, Wow, and this week even CoH is getting in on it), and were afraid one thing would lead to another, and it could end up totally ruining Spider-man if he was in a game where people got married.

I’ll await the DC one, but I wonder if any major company could pull off an MMO of established comics characters, because they couldn’t really let us control them, and therefore, we’re either bit players in that world, with no real interactions with the guys we’d like to play (or at least team with), or what we do has no feeling of real effect when we transfer back to the comics, which kinda’ breaks the rush you’d get for fighting Doom or Luthor or whoever.

CoH has a decent feel, the right archtypes, but you feel important to things by the end of it (Level 50). I just wish it wasn’t so repetitive.

Now I know how my elderly uncle felt when I tried to explain a VCR to him in the mid-1980s. I have no idea what an MMO is…I thought Marvel was getting into the health care business for a second…

Those corporate scum. It would have been cool.

R.I.P. Steve Gerber. Another soul gone to glory.

I agree, with COH out there, I can’t see room for another superhero MMO. I thought it was a bad idea from the get go. Something tells me the guys kept looking at what they were doing, then looking over at another screen with City of Heroes on it, and said “screw it!”.

Oh, and Brian - I don’t think they actually ‘reported’ it, just speculated that it was dead since no new news or screenshots had come out.

Well this is sad news but honestly, did we need to play another City of Heros with updated graphics and the Marvel name? No, not really. Best course of action is to hire a Triple A developer to handle a next generation game that innovates and brings something new to MMOGs rather just a fresh coat of paint. Then again maybe this game was on that path? Who knows. I do know as a previous City of Heros player that lots of promised features were scrapped like aliases, abilities like being able to solve missions muliple ways and even vehicles. All this talk doesn’t affect me either way since I don’t play MMOGs anymore. It’d be nice to see the progress on what the game was on the path to becoming.

this is terrible news for marvel MMO fans.. but at least we have the upcoming Marvel Ultimate Alliance game sequel coming.. they should make that the basis of any type of online game system..