City Of Heroes - Shutting Down
When I woke up this morning, I received an unusual e-mail from an MMO game I played before. Though I haven’t visited that game since 2007, it’s quite disheartening to see that a good online game is shutting its doors to the public. City of Heroes is officially shutting down this day, December 2, 2012… COH is one of the major MMORPG that is based on a make-your-own-superhero mechanics. It’s the father of character customization which gave way to other online games to follow its footsteps. I also enjoyed this game for a year, discovering many powerful skills for my toons, and meeting a lot of superheroes in the process.
As like any other online games out there, it needs a community to follow it and a group of gamers to invest on it by paying their monthly subscription; this converts into revenues which help run their operations. Also, COH needs manpower and resources to exist; without these important components – it will really come to this point. It is clear that there’s a big shift in online gaming these days, as most MMORPG goes for Free-To-Play business model – with micro-transactions for their revenues. With these changes, most Pay-To-Play online gaming companies will have no choice but to convert their games to the FTP model, because it will be very hard to compete with other new free online games when they still stick with their old system.
