NCSoft has granted a license to the private server that revived City of Heroes.
City of Heroes was a superhero themed MMO from the far flung past of the 2000s. Korean publisher NCSoft already found massive success worldwide thanks to Lineage, but was looking to expand with titles that would cater to Western tastes.
The game revolved around one Paragon City, where super powered characters could join up to complete missions, and fight villains, or heroes. This was unavowedly a massively successful title in the genre, racking up multiple awards across the industry, and sustaining itself for a good eight years. After twenty three major updates, two expansions, and flirting with free to play, NCSoft shut the title down in 2013, with then developer Paragon Studios citing “realignment of company focus and publishing support”.
In 2019, the source code for City of Heroes was found, enabling fans to create a private server for the game, called Homecoming. NCSoft notably did not move against the server’s creation, given that its very existence was violating the company’s intellectual property rights.
As reported by PC Gamer, Homecoming’s operators shared this message in an FAQ:
“Homecoming has been granted a licence to operate a City of Heroes™ server and further develop the game—subject to conditions and limitations under the contract.”
As it turns out, they cite a positive and productive relationship with NCSoft since they started working on the server. They also confirmed that the people who have been playing on the server are going to find that their data and progress are safe and won’t be destroyed.
The server runs on volunteer donations, and they mention a need to raise donation goals. Given the server’s popularity, they expect to meet those goals.
Everything looks on the up and up for Homecoming, but some fans may not entirely understand the situation here. So we’ll get into some of those details.
NCSoft shut down City of Heroes because they couldn’t sustain its profitability. Subsequently, because they own the copyright, they have the right to shut down any attempt to revive the game without their permission.
NCSoft was well within their rights to shut Homecoming’s servers down. This was a situation where they did an anti-Nintendo, and worked with the operators, to even legally allow them to keep going. They can shut it down anytime, but as we now understand, that isn’t likely to happen.
NCSoft is preoccupied with other things, in any case. They are now one of many Korean game publishers who are looking to expand to Western markets because their native Korea is saturated with games, to the point that the players can’t even keep up anymore.
NCSoft once found limited success in this regard decades ago with City of Heroes and Age of Conan. Today, Neowiz has opened a window for its fellow Korean publishers with the success of its title, Lies of P.
NCSoft’s current projects are Project LLL, an ambitious shooter MMO, and Project M, an interactive movie game that’s clearly made of more than QTEs. Both are being made by NCSoft themselves, reflecting their own ambitions to become known as the maker of global hits, and not just the publisher.
As for City of Heroes, that was not made by NCSoft, but one Cryptic Studios. And that Cryptic Studios was acquired by Embracer, and ironically had layoffs because of this acquisition.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely that Cryptic Studios will get to work on City of Heroes again, but perhaps NCSoft is observing Homecoming to see if there’s enough interest to make it worthwhile to revive the game today.
It’s because of all of this that a game publisher has tolerated copyright infringement of their property, all the way to legally sanctioning it. And that’s a hell of a way to start 2024.
